At TMRW, the first mobile-only digital bank designed for the ASEAN millennial, the digital service strategy is built through a bottom-up approach. They started with a deep understanding of how millennials typically interact with one another and designed the service model to mimic this manner of interaction. TMRW’s unique service delivery model puts them at the top of the digital banking game and have won them accolades from all corners of the world. Recently, they have also bagged several major awards at the Digital CX Awards 2020 by The Digital Banker.
Awards received include: Winner, Best Digital Bank for Customer Experience, Outstanding Chabot Customer Experience and Outstanding Leadership in Customer Experience – Institution. They’ve also been awarded Highly Acclaimed, Outstanding Customer Experience Account Opening. This feat of accomplishment was achieved with over 200 nominations received for various awards categories.
Judging this year’s awards are subject-matter experts known for their integrity and unbiased adjudication from companies such as Forrester, EY, Fuji Xerox, Bain & Company, Wipro Digital and KPMG.
“We are truly honoured to be recognised as the leader in customer experience. By bringing technology into the core of what we do, we can bring in an assortment of capabilities in our customer service delivery, such as multilingual response management, human support through chat and voice and deep-linked screens for ease of usage interactions. This motivates us to do more,” said Delwyn Phoon, First Vice President, TMRW Digital Bank at United Overseas Bank.
“To achieve a truly simple account opening process for TMRW Indonesia, the team leveraged on permissible remote KYC guidelines set out by the local regulators.”
TMRW Intelligent Assistant – setting a new benchmark in customer service
TMRW’s distinct service delivery model brings together a complex orchestration of chatbot, live chat, and VOIP voice call similar to some of the leading messaging platforms – creating an experience unmatched by any typical bank. TMRW’s chatbot Tia (TMRW Intelligent Assistant) is right at the center of this experience. Tia also has the distinction of being the first chatbot in the Thai banking industry with full Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities in Thai language and the only banking chatbot in Thailand with dual language capabilities (Thai and English).
“TMRW’s distinct service delivery model brings together a complex orchestration of chatbot, live chat, and VOIP voice call – creating an experience unmatched by any typical bank.”
TMRW’s digital customer service model boasts of many firsts in the Thai banking and ASEAN banking industry in terms of capability, design and performance. Among them are:
- Chatbot orchestration. First digital service model that uses chatbot to orchestrate the delivery of customer service as a combination of self service, FAQ responses and human support through voice or chat – all without the user having to ever exit or switch away from the TMRW app.
- Sentiment detection for improved confidence with bot usage. One of the largest challenges associated with a chatbot implementation is its ability to handle customer’s sentiment. The world of NLP acknowledges that sentiment detection remains the largest challenge faced by this technology and the most important one to surpass in order for acceptance of chatbots as a norm in customer service. Tia runs multiple algorithms in the background to detect sentiments when responding to customer queries to detect a variety of human emotions such as humour, disappointment, anger, fear and anxiety.
- Ability to understand slang, typographical errors and short phrases in Thai language. The team spent approximately 8 months engaging the services of over 100 native Thai language speakers and collecting more than 25,000 words, sentences and phrases to train, test and ascertain Tia’s ability to understand the user’s input in Thai, even with inclusion of typos or slang words. After the official launch of TMRW in March 2019, Tia has been trained with over 10,000 phrases monthly taking its NLP comprehension to more than 100,000 Thai words and phrases.
- First chatbot orchestration to move conversation from text chat to voice within the same interface. Every query is different when measured on the scale of user anxiety or emotion. Queries on card lost or fraud generally tend to involve a higher degree of anxiety and the best efforts to handle them through text chat may still leave the user feeling unassured. This is precisely the reason why Tia brings in a voice agent into the conversation the moment the user says he is worried about a fraud in his account, without attempting to resolve the query by herself or passing it to a text chat agent.
- Highly scalable and re-deployable operating model. Tia’s architectural design allows TMRW to scale Tia’s ability to handle newer queries and additional languages with ease. Tia is now being trained in Bahasa Indonesia and soon will handle customer enquiries in English and Bahasa in tandem with TMRW’s launch in Indonesia in 2020.
- Zero production downtime. Tia has had zero production down time since its launch, indicating her ability to handle hundreds of concurrent conversations with customers, without negative impact on her ability to respond on time and accurately to each and every one of them.
Remote Video Account Opening in Indonesia
After the successful public launch of TMRW in Thailand in March 2019, the TMRW team quickly adapted and planned for an Indonesian implementation. Indonesian regulations are, however, more favourable to remote account opening. This presented the TMRW team an opportunity to offer a more convenient account opening process than Thailand.
To achieve a truly simple account opening process for TMRW Indonesia, the team leveraged on permissible remote know-your-customers (KYC) guidelines set out by the local regulators. They then scanned the market to see what is available, what works and what does not. TMRW Indonesia adapted its Thailand implementation model, with a key difference – the Indonesia model will feature full remote video authentication.
The video authentication is designed as a two-step process. Customers start off by answering three simple questions – one’s full name as shown on identification card, date of birth and mother’s maiden name. When that is done, a video chat request is triggered by the TMRW app to initiate the video authentication. Here, the customer would need to perform a short video selfie while holding up their eKTP Card. This video authentication process takes less than a minute.
During its tests, more than 85% of the respondents were able to complete the video authentications on first try, and close to 98% were able to complete on the second try.
New-to-bank customers can now verify and authenticate themselves on the TMRW mobile app – anytime, anywhere. They do not have to wait in line or spend their precious time traveling to the branches. This offers customers a superior customer experience compared to traditional account opening, as they can apply and get their Savings Accounts approved within minutes.
Read more about the winners at the Digital CX Awards 2020 here.
***