New Delhi, 29^th May, 2020.

 In the ongoing Coronavirus-induced lockdown across the country, digital banking has become the need of the hour to fulfill key banking requirements of customers. With a choice of multiple digital channels such as Mobile Banking and Net Banking, Kotak customers can do most of their banking remotely.

Since the lockdown began in March 2020, over 60,000 Kotak Mahindra Bank customers who were previously branch-active but digitally inactive have now turned digitally active, completing at least one digital banking transaction during the lockdown period. The top three digital payment modes used by these customers are UPI, Fund Transfers and Recharge.

In addition, Keyavoicebot and chatbot offer customers smart and quick 24x7 channels to seamlessly interact with the bank on a real-time basis.

KeyaVoicebot:

Launched in 2018, Keya is the first-ever voicebot in the Indian banking sector. Powered by AI-based conversational banking, the Keyavoicebot is able to increasingly autonomously fulfil customer requests without reaching out for human assistance.

·         Queries related to Loan Moratorium: In March and April 2020, Keya provided essential details to customers who called Kotak’s phone banking helpline enquiring about the loan moratorium offered by Kotak. Keya successfully helped 11% of the callers about the loan moratorium by providing relevant information herself.

·         Recognising Intent of the customer query: Keya’s library has been significantly boosted, resulting in greater call accuracy and reduced call duration. She recognizes the intent of the customer’s query in over 75% of the cases. In addition, in cases where she is unable to understand a customer, she intelligently probes to identify the purpose of the call. 

·         This has helped reduce the time of delivering an accurate response to a customer’s query by 20 to 25 seconds, greatly enhancing customer experience.

·         Top 5 banking queries during the lockdown: Among the top 5 queries received by Keyavoicebot during the lockdown, is “how to unblock net banking”. This indicates that a rising number of people are now transitioning to digital modes of banking.

·         Queries on banking balance, credit card balance, the last five bank account transactions, and the last five credit card account transactions are the other four top queries. Together, these five queries account for 90% of the total calls handled by the Keyavoicebot.

Keya Chatbot:

Keyachatbot was launched in 2018 and is available on all three platforms – net banking, mobile banking and the website of Kotak. The AI-enabled chatbot is a text + voice-based bot that can answer a range of queries related to bank accounts, debit and credit cards, fund transfers, loans and fixed deposits.

Over the last couple of months during the lockdown, the Keyachatbot has become one of the major channels to serve customers.

·         Queries related to Loan Moratorium: The chatbot is seeing a surge in the number of queries on loan moratorium.

·         Queries on EMIs on Credit Card transactions: Notably, during this time, the bank saw a 300% increase in requests to convert credit card transactions to EMIs and a 20% increase in credit card activation requests in the month of April as compared to March.

·         Skillsets/Features Added: Kotak has added more services like package tracking (available only on Keya chatbot), account balance enquiry and transaction history to address a greater number of customer queries.

·         Increase in Adoption & Accuracy levels: Since the launch in 2018, over 3 million users have got their queries answered by Keyachatbot. The chatbot has also handled more than 7.2 million service requests till date.

·         During the month of April 2020, even though overall banking activity dropped due to the lockdown, the Keyachatbot registered an increase of 28% in queries asked, as the bank’s contact centres & branches were not working at full capacity.

·         In addition, with a knowledge repository of 95,000+ questions covering all major banking products, Keyachatbot is able to solve a range of queries raised by customers with a technical accuracy of 83%. On an average, the chatbot handles over 1 million service requests per month and receives 60% repeat users on a month-on-month basis.

·         During the lockdown, the bank engaged over 650 employees across various product and contact centre teams to help increase the knowledge repository of Keyachatbot. As a result, the bank was able to double the chatbot’s knowledge repository in a few weeks, which will help in further increasing the capacity and accuracy of Keyachatbot to answer customer queries.

The fact that chatbots and voicebots are keeping customer service for the Bank up and running despite a nationwide lockdown speaks of the real world impact of AI and tech investments by Kotak. Both are big steps towards making banking contactless in a post-COVID world. A new ecosystem comprising app, bot and customisation will form the foundation of banking in the new normal and that is what is indicated in the changing behaviour among customers.