UnionBank leverages AI for better customer experiences
The tool we developed and deployed at UnionBank acts as a decision support system that helps prioritize and make more informed decisions.
To keep up with the changing behaviors of today’s banking customers, Union Bank of the Philippines has unveiled an innovative tool that leverages Data Science and Artificial Intelligence to enable and accelerate better and more meaningful experiences for its customers. At the same time, the initiative maximizes value creation for the bank regarding its products and services.
“At UnionBank, we take delivering the best customer experience very seriously. To ensure our products, services, and interactions across channels keep on delighting our customers, we continuously get feedback from them. We work closely with our Data Science and AI counterparts to help us analyze the vast data we get to keep on providing what our customers love and quickly address those that need improvement,” said Albert Cuadrante, UnionBank’s chief marketing officer.
One of the critical aspects of this DSAI-powered tool from UnionBank, the Net Promoter Score Free-text Analysis Tool, is that it can automate the identification of user needs and gains through direct feedback analysis. NPS is a vital consumer metric used by the bank to estimate the loyalty and satisfaction of its customers towards its products and services. Customers can rate the bank with a satisfaction score ranging from 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest) and give feedback or reviews to expound on their scores and recent experiences.
The solution is designed in a way that allows it to understand the sentiments of customers through free text found in various channels and platforms, such as the UnionBank Online mobile app or surveys answered in branches.
“The information that we can get from our various feedback channels, whether through online surveys, comments on social media, and actual interviews, allow us to have more personalized offers and engagements with our different customers, ultimately deepening their relationship with us,” Cuadrante said.
Based on the tool’s performance over eight months, UnionBank said it was able to streamline the analysis of more than 10,000 monthly survey responses and over 35,000 monthly inquiries and complaints from customers. This has proven invaluable for the bank’s product teams in understanding the customers’ key concerns and prioritizing actions to be implemented quickly and efficiently.
“The tool, which leverages NLP (Natural Language Processing), customer data analytics, and clustering techniques, identifies the top issues raised by multiple customer segments in just three to five minutes, saving around one to two weeks and significant man-hours of manual screening and processing texts,” said Gabriel Isaac Ramolete, a Data Scientist from UnionBank’s AI and Innovation Center of Excellence (AI & Innovation CoE).
“It is challenging for humans to read thousands of feedback texts to understand its impact on customer experience. Technologies like NLP function best at manually extracting insights from big and unstructured data. The tool we developed and deployed at UnionBank acts as a decision support system that helps prioritize and make more informed decisions”, said Dr. Adrienne Heinrich, UnonBank’s AI & Innovation CoE Head.