While at IBM, Dennis was tapped to improve customer care at the bank on two fronts, virtual assistance using Watson to improve customer/agent satisfaction and to empower agents with information become more effective with solving and educating customers. He first recognized that IBM did not have a product, but a bunch of apis. Taking his vast knowledge of SOA(service orchestration architecture), ESB, and integration experience, he developed the Universal Conversation/Cognitive Gateway, UCG, which managed the workflow of the AI and NLU services that were implemented at the bank.
Regions Bank Benefits:
Managed 331,000 customer care calls entirely within Watson in first year of use; projecting slightly over a million customer care calls handled within Watson over three years. By building virtual agents and conversations using the Watson platform for three common customer care inquiries, Regions enabled self-service customer care while fully automating and handling inquiries from end to end using virtual agents. By the third year of the analysis, Watson is projected to help Regions manage over 350,000 customer care calls entirely within Watson annually. The resulting risk-adjusted three-year savings from call deflections total a PV of just over $3 million.
Reduced average call handle times by over 57,000 hours annually. Using Watson for long- and short-tail tagging using Watson Explorer, Regions built out a banker assist solution to expedite research for problem resolution and improve customer care knowledge management. As a result, bankers and agents have seen a 10% reduction in the 4.5 minutes they spent researching customer issues on an average call, saving an average of 27 seconds per call.
Power Glove for AI
UCG proved the Regions development staff to externalize all api flows and executed key back office requests for customer information that was returned in conversations to improve the customers experience
Orchestration over all external integrations
UCG became the conversational hub that the virtual self service banker and cognitive bank assist utilized to execute all external calls to all SAAS resources necessary to educate the machine learning modules and fill all conversational and analytical flows for the bank.
