DBS Taiwan launched iChatBot for its personal banking customers in 2019. The chatbot was strategically placed within DBS Taiwan’s business account on LINE. The social media app has a 98% penetration rate in Taiwan, with 83% of businesses using LINE as a medium to connect with customers.
Within the account, we embedded a DBS-designed iChatBot, which provides answers to FAQs, receive the latest banking updates, and complete their banking tasks natively via iChatBot.
During the pandemic, COVID-19 safety restrictions in Taiwan limited the physical activities of citizens. This greatly confined their access to physical services, such as retrieving credit card statements, and cancellations of credit card statements, which could previously only be done at branches. This sparked us to introduce a series of new functions via iChatBot.
The main goal of iChatBot is to help customers complete their jobs to be done, while alleviating the load of DBS Taiwan’s customer service staff, who can focus on solving more complex issues that require verbal assistance. The usage rate of iChatBot rose exponentially during COVID-19 due to the emergence of a zero-touch lifestyle and decreased physical interaction.
To enhance our customer’s experience, and continually ensure a seamless customer journey despite the pandemic and reduced physical interactions, DBS Taiwan launched five new initiatives between 2021 and 2022 to cater to the customer needs.
Developments and deployments done fully in-house. The five initiatives are as follows:
DBS Taiwan employed two management activities to ensure the iChatBot’s success, and to overcome the challenges.
We regularly engaged business product owners and technology teams to share prototypes and key findings. This enabled us to receive early feedback, pivot where necessary, iterate our frameworks, and conduct experiments to drive digital adoption.
The projects were done in collaboration with six teams: data analytics, call centre, customer experience, technology, operations, and product. We collaborated closely with data scientists across business analytics and data teams. They significantly boosted the team’s analytics skillsets and resulted us being able to implement better practices for our operation models, further emphasising a data-driven culture within DBS Taiwan. We engaged internal teams with specialised knowledge in cloud computing. With their support, we were able to quickly overcome the steep learning curve. There were also early engagements with legal and compliance teams to identify and resolve key issues relating to the usage of sensitive customer information. This enabled us to receive the required approvals in time.
With the introduction of the five initiatives, DBS Taiwan saw an increase of iChatBot users grow to 250,000, and achieved the following results:
