Success Story Jan 6, 2021 · IBM Watson · Banking

While at IBM, Dennis was tapped to improve customer care at the bank on two fronts: virtual assistance using Watson to lift customer/agent satisfaction, and empowering agents with the right information to be more effective at solving problems and educating customers.

He recognized that IBM did not have a finished product — just a collection of APIs. Drawing on deep SOA, ESB, and integration experience, he developed the Universal Conversation/Cognitive Gateway (UCG): a SaaS platform that orchestrated the workflow of Watson AI and NLU services and was implemented at the bank.

UCG: A Power Glove for Customer Care

UCG enabled Regions' development staff to externalize all workflows and execute key back-office requests for customer information that personalized conversations to improve the customer experience — orchestrating every external integration through a single, governed surface.

Regions Bank Benefits

  • 331,000 customer-care calls managed entirely within Watson in year one — projecting ~1M over three years. By year three, Watson is projected to handle 350,000+ calls/year entirely within Watson, expanding capacity by the equivalent of 28 FTE bankers. Risk-adjusted three-year savings from call deflections: PV ~$3M.
  • 57,000+ hours/year of average call handle time eliminated. Using Watson Explorer for long- and short-tail tagging plus a banker-assist solution for problem-resolution research, agents saw a 10% reduction in the 4.5 minutes spent researching customer issues — saving an average of 27 seconds per call.
  • Build once, deploy omnichannel. ~90% of Regions' care requests came through the phone channel at the time, but conversations built in Watson can be deployed across click-to-chat, SMS, and mobile apps as customer preferences evolve — without massive incremental development cost.
  • Customer service as a differentiator. Forrester's research found 52% of customer-service leaders rate differentiation as high-or-critical priority and 63% prioritize rising customer expectations. Regions saw a measurable uptick in referral rate after adopting cognitive customer-care solutions.
  • Cognitive Center of Excellence. Regions built a CoE to roll out new use cases — fee waiving, online-banking FAQs, credential resets, plus a roadmap for credit-card activation, profile updates, and transaction disputes — and to expand banker-assist into branches and other lines of business.
Total measurable customer-engagement savings hit $5 million — driven by call deflection, agent productivity, and the omnichannel reuse of every conversation built once on Watson.

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