NAB Bot saves bank $1.2 million

National Australia Bank’s (NAB) virtual assistant investment has saved the organisation $1.2 million in support team costs since its deployment seven months ago.

NAB considered four different bots, comparing user interfaces, authentication, usability, security and cost, and ultimately chose Microsoft’s Azure Bot Framework.

Raj Ghuliani, head of technology for workplace support services at NAB spoke at the Microsoft Ignite spotlight session today about the organisation’s NAB Bot journey, which he said has improved productivity, reduced costs and enabled a better customer experience.

According to Ghuliani, after completing a proof of concept NAB implemented NAB Bot across the organisation’s 35,000 employees, and it has since been used 57,000 times, across 800 use cases.

“It is very pleasing to see that just over 50 percent of the consumption of NAB Bot was via NAB customer-facing colleagues. The reason that's pleasing is because we know our NAB customer-facing colleagues need to focus on servicing our customers rather than spending time with technology or any other support team. So they could do both in tandem,” said Ghuliani.

“We asked for feedback after every session by the NAB Bot, that's 4.4 for average rating out of five, and the response rate is just under one second.”

Alongside NAB Bot the bank also has a number of support services including a service desk and a live chat function.

According to Ghuliani, the plan is for NAB Bot to becoming the single source of truth for support staff.

“What we are planning on doing in the future as part of our target state is to ensure that NAB Bot aggregates and becomes the single point of truth and source. Where the network will direct our team and our colleagues at NAB on what is the best possible solution depending on the question they're asking, depending on the technology-related issue they might be facing. So, the NAB Bot will help them out.”

NAB also is looking to NAB Bot to fulfil servicing queries related to human resources, property services, procurement, business support applications and compliance-related questions he said.

“All this information is available at many other different locations, whether it be on the intranet whether on other policy pages but for a colleague to be able to find those it can take them a few minutes. What we are trying to achieve is save them that time, let NAB Bot give you the right answer.”