Rabobank, a multinational banking institution headquartered in the Netherlands, has a long history of cooperation, innovation, and people-centered solutions. As part of its mission to grow a better world together, Rabobank aspires to “conversational banking,” which prioritizes friendly, efficient customer service on demand. Reconstructing its virtual agent solution with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents allowed Rabobank to simplify operations, reduce costs, and create a better, more cohesive experience for customers.
“We wanted a complete solution with the control, openness, and flexibility to tune it to our detailed needs and differentiate ourselves from virtual assistants in the market, and we found that in Power Virtual Assistants.”
Chris den Arend, Solution Architect, Rabobank
Putting people first
Rabobank, a multinational banking institution headquartered in the Netherlands, has a long history of cooperation, innovation, and people-centered solutions. The company retains this spirit today as it pursues its mission of “growing a better world together”—investing a share of profits in the common good and upholding eco-conscious practices that support the people and communities in which it operates.
Rabobank knows it plays a role in the pivotal life events of the people it serves—including transitioning into adulthood, joining households, buying a home, starting a business, and starting families. With that, Rabobank aspires to provide every customer with “conversational banking,” which prioritizes friendly, personalized, and efficient service on demand. With ever-increasing customer expectations and new technological forces that are disrupting and reshaping its industry, Rabobank looked at harnessing AI technologies to inspire and create new opportunities to engage with customers, empower employees and significantly reduce customer support costs.
In the spirit of conversational banking, Rabobank shaped a vision for how its customers engage with advisors and virtual assistants in a continuous conversation across all channels, blending the best of human and artificial interactions. Conversational banking empowers Rabobank employees through automation, efficiently routing conversations to the most suitable adviser, and deflecting easy-to-solve questions to self-service channels. Data-driven insights are used to identify sales opportunities and tailor services to each individual customer, proactively responding to their issues and needs even before they ask a question.
“With the integration capabilities of Power Virtual Agents we can take the next step in our digital customer service. Using CRM data to make automated conversations more personal and relevant, and connecting to banking services to provide end-to-end solutions for our customers.”
Stefan Bijkerk, Conversation AI Specialist, Rabobank
Continual innovation
To help manage customer inquiries, Rabobank had initially adopted an on-premises virtual agent solution, building a conversational platform that had proved functional for routing customer calls to the right service team, but not efficient. “We had an interactive voice response (IVR) and a chatbot that were separate from one another,” says Stefan Bijkerk, Conversation AI Specialist at Rabobank. “This came with the challenge of maintaining two solutions, even though the work overlaps for a great part.”
For example, the systems for chat and voice support had to be updated with new conversations and logic separately, even though they often used the same information and models. The disconnect between the voice and chat virtual agent systems meant duplicative work and difficulties creating comparative reports. Finally, the platform was housed on-premises, required specialized developer support, and was relatively inflexible, slowing innovation. “We wanted a complete solution with the control, openness, and flexibility to tune it to our detailed needs and differentiate ourselves from virtual assistants in the market, and we found that in Power Virtual Assistants," says Chris den Arend, a Solution Architect at Rabobank.
“Power Virtual Agents gives us the ability to integrate banking processes, so a virtual agent can execute actions on behalf of the customer instead of guiding a user.”
Derco Zeegers, Lead Product Manager, Rabobank
Microsoft Power Virtual Agents as the one conversational platform for all channels
Rabobank decided it was time to reconstruct its virtual agent solution. The company wanted a modern, cloud-based, out-of-the-box platform to simplify its architecture while increasing its digital customer service experience, including adding transactional capabilities to the virtual agents.
Aside from the baseline capabilities you’d expect from a conversational platform, Rabobank had a few requirements. The new platform needed to be open and easy to integrate new services into allowing flexibility for Rabobank to keep improving its virtual agents. And, of course, it needed to reduce duplication and allow for seamless content lifecycle management—no more applying the same conversational improvements to two disjointed systems. “We were looking for an open, easy-to-integrate platform with a strong roadmap,” says den Arend.
Reconstructing its virtual agent solution with Power Virtual Agents allowed Rabobank’s team to simplify operations, reduce costs, and create a better, more cohesive experience for customers.
Customers have multiple ways of getting in touch with Rabobank. If they choose telephone or chat messaging, their contact starts with a virtual agent. Over the phone, a virtual agent will collect information about the user and their needs, then transfer a call to the most appropriate live agent. Via chat, though, Rabobank virtual agents can engage more in the customer experience and complete transactions on behalf of the customer, rather than guiding a person through the appropriate steps.
With the virtual agents for both voice and chat channels now running out of Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, reporting is unified using Microsoft Power BI to track virtual agent key performance indicators like resolutions and escalation rates and business metrics like customer satisfaction and routing accuracy while monitoring performance for both types of conversations.
A powerful partnership
With the help of Microsoft Partner Network members Avanade and Accenture, the team was able to set up the new solution and migrate conversational data from the previous solution into the new, mitigating the amount of work that had to be redone.
The implementation started in December 2021, and the first virtual agent was deployed to production in early April 2022.
At the beginning of 2022, before Rabobank moved to Power Virtual gents, only about 20 percent of Rabobank’s customers were using the online chat option as their first point of contact. As of May 2022, that number rose to 25 percent. Moreover, virtual agents were completing about 40 to 50 percent of the business contacts that they started without needing to escalate to a human agent—meaning about 60,000 to 80,000 calls per month were handled entirely through automation.
That volume is significant in a market that is increasingly putting pressure on businesses to maximize efficiency with automation. “Power Virtual Agents gives us the ability to integrate banking processes, so a virtual agent can execute actions on behalf of the customer instead of guiding a user,” says Derco Zeegers, Lead Product Manager at Rabobank.
Automating repetitive processes like raising withdrawal caps frees up the human experts at Rabobank to provide better support to customers with more complex situations, while ensuring that all customers receive the personalized care and support that Rabobank knows they deserve. "Doing conversational AI right can lead to cost savings. Becoming more cost effective allows us to stay competitive and retain our investment capabilities. At the same time, labor market conditions increase the need for efficient operations through automation,” says Zeegers.
Looking ahead
Rabobank plans to extend the power of its virtual agents to even more use cases and conversation types by preparing the virtual agents to handle more complex requests on behalf of customers, like changing the address on file for a company. “With the integration capabilities of Power Virtual Agents, we can take the next step in our digital customer service,” says Bijkerk. “Things like using CRM data to make automated conversations more personal and relevant and connecting to banking services to provide end-to-end solutions for our customers."
By the end of 2022, the company aims to have virtual agents serving as the first point of contact for 30 percent of customers, potentially processing 12 million conversations a year.
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