Liberbank is the eighth largest bank in Spain, the result of successive mergers of savings banks throughout the country. In recent years it has been facing the paradigm shift in the financial sector, opting for a customer-centric strategy focused on digitalization and "Openbanking".

In this context, the health crisis caused by COVID-19 forced banks, as an essential sector, to continue providing customer service in person at branches, but with conditions that had never existed before.

Speed and agility to offer a solution adapted to the new circumstances were indispensable requirements. New systems had to be devised to attend to customers in line with health measures, and without this leading to disproportionate saturation in services such as the contact center.

Virtual assistant to manage capacity

In order to be able to continue to serve in the offices, it was necessary to establish a system of appointments in advance, to ensure interpersonal distance. The contact center was not prepared for the exponential growth that the flood of calls resulting from the confinement would entail. Liberbank needed to automate the management of appointments so that human agents could focus on other activities of value to customers.

Thus Liby was born, a virtual assistant on Dialogflow and Google Cloud Platform that automatically handles customers' online appointment requests. The virtual assistant helped the customer find the nearest office and, depending on the operation they needed to perform, offered them available time slots so they could choose the most convenient one. 

As Palmira Aldeguer, director of Big Data and Advanced Analytics at Liberbank explains, "the solution offered by Emergya, based on Dialogflow with Google Cloud technology, was the best option in terms of development speed, security, scalability and results in terms of User Experience".

Scalable architecture for adding new use cases

The solution provided by Emergya was the creation of an Artificial Intelligence virtual assistant with a scalable architecture. Thanks to agile methodologies, it was possible to propose a first use case, whose resolution was urgent for Liberbank: the management of the influx to the office, through the system of previous appointments. 

Once this first use case had been solved, new user stories were added. These were aimed at answering customers' most frequently asked questions, focused on Liberbank products and services.

In this sense, Palmira Aldeguer says that "the prior appointment service was only the first brick in our Virtual Assistant strategy. We have expanded the initial case with new conversational experiences in which customers can resolve their doubts about how digital banking works and receive information about different products and services".  

Aldeguer also says that "our goal is to evolve Liby into a real voice banking experience using natural language and the voice itself to interact with it. In this way, we believe we can improve the customer experience, incorporate new communication channels and break down the usability barriers that may remain when dealing with digital banking apps, especially for less digital groups".

The core component of Liby is Dialogflow, although other GCP products have been included in the system to add essential capabilities such as data processing, system interconnection, security through data anonymization and advanced analytics. 

Value contribution for the customer and for the business

One of the first advantages of working with agile methodologies was being able to launch the first version of Liby quickly and iteratively, especially for a use case where time was of the essence. 

"Thanks to Emergya and Google Cloud Platform, we have been able to launch, in a very short time, a virtual assistant that brings great value to both our customers and our business," explains Palmira Aldeguer. The first version of Liby was available to customers in less than two months. 

In terms of the results achieved during the first six months of the launch of this first version of the virtual assistant, we can highlight the following:

• One of the most relevant metrics was the number of messages managed. In the first six months, this figure was over 245,000, all without placing an additional burden on Liberbank's Contact Centre service.
• In terms of prior appointments, the Virtual Assistant managed 2% of the total number of requests received by Liberbank in 2020. 
• Finally, beyond the figures related to operations, the Virtual Assistant launched has been received satisfactorily by the majority of consumers: up to 90% of users have rated Liby's performance positively during the first 6 months in production.