FNB Zambia improves financial consumer support with Proto’s AICX platform

First National Bank Zambia held their customer experience reputation on social media channels to a very high standard, offering live service for all customer inquiries. They had previously accomplished this with a contact centre of roughly 7 team members, with 1-4 active at any given time. However, trying to keep up with the demands of one-on-one conversations led to long customer wait times.

Since most of the customer queries were very repetitive, it became apparent that they needed an automated solution to answer frequently asked questions across social channels, shifting contact centre focus to unique and pressing concerns that truly needed human attention.

More importantly, they also needed a 24/7 solution to help banking customers resolve their queries outside of office hours.

First National Bank Zambia launched Proto’s AI Customer Experience (AICX) solution on Facebook, automating responses to basic customer queries as well as handling live chat for cases that needed attention from live agents, replacing the bank’s previous live chat software.

Proto’s chatbot was trained with existing queries on the bank's social channels, with subsequent real-time training based on new consumer chat histories in local languages such as Bemba, Nyanja, Kaonde, Lozi, Luvale, Lunda, and Tonga. This resulted in continuous improvements to the chatbot's understanding that enabled it to automate a high volume of consumer queries.

The chatbot automatically escalates urgent cases requiring human attention to live agents, collecting necessary information such as contact details in the process. Agents receive notifications via Proto's livechat feature during office hours, or via urgent emails to standby agents who provide service outside of normal work hours. With enough time and information to handle urgent cases, agent workloads have significantly reduced.

First National Bank Zambia now looks forward to extending their AICX solution with Proto's upgraded AICX platform.

With the help of Proto's AICX Platform, FNB Zambia has managed to scale customer support more efficiently and allocate live support to cases where one-on-one assistance truly makes a difference. The bank was able to drastically reduce customer wait times and scale quality service in just one week, and will upgrade their platform to add proGPT and ProAnalytics for superior support across all channels.

FNB Zambia can continue to maintain their high standard of customer service across social channels, and can now look forward to expanding their reach across new channels as well.