Staying true to its vision of “staying ahead of the curve, building stronger connections with customers by humanising banking experience”, CIMB Singapore’s strategic initiatives have been planned and executed in a way that keeps its customers constantly engaged.
CIMB Singapore’s products can be accessed primarily via its main digital delivery channels – the CIMB website, CIMB Clicks mobile app, and CIMB Clicks online banking – and augmented by its ATM, phone banking and physical branch.
To further deliver on this customer experience, CIMB Singapore has launched EVA Chatbot as an alternative touchpoint.
Built in partnership with Singapore-based artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot start-up Pand.ai, the EVA Chatbot, since 2020, provides SMEs with the necessary support required in a fast and secure manner. Leveraging the foundation built since then, CIMB Singapore has not only expanded EVA Chatbot’s capabilities, but also elevated the offering to the retail side of the bank.
A Gamut of Features
With the ultimate goal of offering customers a seamless and comprehensive banking experience, the EVA Chatbot comes with a host of capabilities.
These include a live chat function for immediate assistance to customer needs, a live exchange rate alert feature, personalised campaigns for a more engaging customer experience, gamification elements for enhanced customer interactions, Lunar New Year new notes booking bot for festive requirements, automated video appointment booking for Know Your Customer (KYC) checks, insurance bot, and integration of SGD-MYR set live exchange rate function with CIMB Clicks mobile app.
As part of its new initiatives, in 2023, the bank rolled out a live agent support feature for online business account opening during operating hours to help customers complete their applications.
Additionally, within the retail sector, the bank launched 20 new campaigns on EVA Chatbot and introduced appointment scheduling at the bank branch for KYC checks, giving customers more flexibility to choose their preferred slot for KYC checks.
The Impact on User Experience
For CIMB Singapore, its overarching strategy with the chatbot is to curate and drive a differentiated customer engagement strategy to acquire, manage and increase customer stickiness with the bank across multiple digital touch points in real-time, 24/7 in a self-serve mode with enhanced efficiencies.
Having already gone through the transformation phase with the introduction of conversational engagement to give a human touch to the customer experience, the strategy’s results have been apparent – reflected by the increased volume of engaged customers over the past year.
The bank plans to continue this momentum by sprinting into the evolution phase, with the implementation of greater automation to drive the overall digital experience.
Over 2024 and 2025, the bank has several key projects lined up with the goal of uplifting productivity, reducing turnaround time and thereby delivering greater speed to its customers.
These include the rollout of CRMLite, which will leverage customer relationship management (CRM) and bot to elevate customer engagement through sales and service in a more targeted manner. Looking ahead, CIMB Singapore wants to ‘empower’ its bots to perform more ‘human tasks’, with plans to leverage generative AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to build a comprehensive knowledge library that allows simple queries to be answered by the bot.
This innovative approach not only garnered a positive response from the bank’s customers, but also led CIMB Singapore to win the Outstanding Chatbot Customer Experience award at the Digital CX Awards 2024, held in Singapore.
