Barclays assistant

An artificial intelligence inspired product to provide a channel of communication with the Bank for efficient, effective and timely service to our customers.

To address the manual process of giving different responses for similar customer requests and proliferation of chat volumes, an Artificial intelligence (AI) inspired product - Barclays Assistant was launched. Designed to support our customers with their most common queries about our services, Barclays Assistant brings together the power of modern technology and our expert team of colleagues in a seamless fusion.

Creating Barclays Assistant 
A significant programme commenced involving five different teams across four different time zones who worked relentlessly to launch Barclays Assistant within a six-month window.

The Technology team from BGSC India played a pivotal role in defining the product strategy, executing Request for Proposal (RFP) process and conducting end-to-end functional testing. They collaborated with Technology Infrastructure India team for infrastructure strategy, planning and execution. The task was to not only have an AI product but also create an iterative adoption roadmap for both authenticated and unauthenticated channels with minimal disruption to business service.

Customers can start a chat with us at any time through Facebook Messenger and receive support on a range of help topics from our new ‘chatbot’ technology.

Chatbots are advanced pieces of software, powered by artificial intelligence, designed to have helpful conversations using natural language our customers prefer.

Where our customer requires support on a subject that our chatbot isn’t yet trained to help with, we seamlessly pass the conversation across to our empathetic team of experts in Virtual Channels, who’ll provide a helpful human touch.

Benefits of the new Barclays Assistant:

• Enabled Community Bankers to focus on providing expert support for our customers’ more complex ‘moment’ needs;
• 24/7 availability of virtual Community Bankers to handle volatile customer traffic;
• Reduced processing time of customer requests;
• Automated and standardised response/actions for similar customer requests.

By identifying the most common topics our customers seek support on and building this functionality into the chatbot, we are able to provide instant support to our customers while freeing valuable time for our colleagues to do what they do best, providing expert support for our customers more complex ‘moment’ needs.