Truist Financial is rolling out a virtual assistant that will start out answering basic questions, but that the bank hopes will evolve to more personalized support over time.
On Thursday the Charlotte, North Carolina, bank announced the launch of Truist Assist, a digital assistant that uses natural-language processing and natural-language understanding to interpret customer questions. It's part of the company's
"Speed to market was how we looked at bots in 2020," said Chad Elley, head of client enablement at Truist. "This is our next iteration. We had a clean slate in front of us."
Truist is the latest major bank to add a virtual assistant to its arsenal of self-service options. Bank of America's
The Australian bank has co-developed a portal to all the knowledge trapped inside multiple virtual assistants throughout the company.
Truist Assist is meant to be a "blended, seamless, connected experience," said Sherry Graziano, head of digital banking and contact centers at Truist. It gets around a common problem plaguing chatbots — frustration for users when the bot can't make out what the customer is asking for — by transitioning to a live agent when the user wants to speak with a human or the bot can no longer understand the query. These agents are part of a dedicated team in the Truist contact center.
The chatbot was under development for around a year and is now available to retail and wealth clients via the Truist app and online. It addresses more than 100 common support inquiries and digital banking questions such as questions about balances, booking appointments, paying bills and setting card controls. The technology comes from Amazon Lex, an artificial intelligence service with advanced natural language models that underpins Amazon Alexa.
Over time, the $545.1 billion-asset bank hopes Truist Assist will be able to deliver more personalized insights and recommendations to users — perhaps flagging duplicate or recurring charges, or payments that fall outside of the user's norm.
"It's going to be an ever growing list as we understand what our clients are appreciating and reacting toward," said Elley.
David Schiff, national head of retail and consumer banking at the consulting firm West Monroe, says personalization is still new among bank digital assistants. "A lot of banks are still focused on bots and early stage technology," he said. "This is a more advanced use case but it is where the industry will be moving."
The product came to life in the new
The bank is also trying to strike a balance between what customers will find useful and what can easily be answered elsewhere.
Christopher Marinac, director of research at Janney Montgomery Scott, notes that this news dovetails with Truist's recent
in both digital areas and predicting future behaviors," he wrote in a brief about the acquisition.
Marinac described the evolution of digital assistants as "a necessary evil as banks balance the cost and output of live customer service call centers with the improving technology of chatbots and machine learning."
But he also noted the Achilles heel of many chatbots.
"From personal experience, sometimes chatbots can answer specific questions quite well and detect when a request is too complicated and needs a live agent," he said. "But other times the chatbot is so general that it completely misses and just leads to frustration."
