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How GenAI is evolving customer journeys in retail banking

After the launch of Cora+, our first GenAI virtual assistant earlier this year, our AI Lead in the Retail Banking Digital & Technology business, Miles Hillier, considers how GenAI could change the way we live, work and bank….

You could be forgiven for thinking that suddenly everyone seems to be talking about GenAI. But AI itself isn’t new. It’s been used by NatWest Group now for about seven years. In its original form, AI was about machines learning and improving iteratively themselves – not necessarily being fully trained by people. Generative AI uses a different type of technology to deliver different outcomes.

I think of AI as a covers band, while GenAI is like original group. A covers band gets really, really good at learning a certain suite of music and performing it in a certain way. Over time, that band will become expert at giving a very consistent performance of something they’ve effectively trained themselves in. But they’re never going to be the original group, because they’re not able to generate completely new, fresh music. That requires a different skillset. Generative AI is very much the ability, not only to deliver a performance in a certain way, but to generate new stuff at the same time. That’s where it diverges from how machine learning has worked in the past. 

GenAI is going to be hugely transformative – in the way that powerful new technologies tend to be. When we launched the very first mobile banking app back in 2009 there was a similar level of optimism, excitement and concern about what it might mean. What we needed to understand then was that if we, as a bank, didn’t get on the agenda and lead in this space, then there wouldn’t be a bank in the future. And the same is true today. Fifteen years ago, we transitioned from desktop to mobile. The next transition will be around AI and how consumers use it to interact with organisations – and we need to be able to respond if we’re to succeed. 

Cora is freeing up time for colleagues to have quality conversations with customers in the moments when they really need that care, empathy and consideration.

Since Cora launched in 2017 it has handled over 55 million customer interactions. In 2024, Cora is expected to have 12–14 million conversations with customers – which will be similar to the level of customer interactions in our telephony centres and branches. That’s huge. And by supporting customers with more of their transactional queries, Cora is freeing up time for colleagues to have quality conversations with customers in the moments when they really need that care, empathy and consideration. 

We’ve seen three generations of Cora since launch. The first offered basic help and support which was instructional – guiding customers on how to complete tasks. The second generation in 2020 was more personalised, recognising the customer at an individual level and allowing them to undertake transactions like reordering a PIN, changing their address or reactivating an ISA, for example. This was pretty influential when COVID hit, allowing Cora to become our superhero and support hundreds of thousands of customers to access payment holidays on loans, credit cards and mortgages. 

We have to seize the opportunity presented by GenAI to go further, faster and do even better for our customers.

The third generation of Cora involved reusing those same digital journeys from online and mobile banking in different channels like telephony. This meant customers could contact us via their channel of choice – and instead of queuing to speak to a colleague, they could chat with Cora for help instead.

When Open AI launched ChatGPT it significantly moved the goalposts. Whenever there’s a big technology inflection point, a new experience benchmark is set – and everyone suddenly needs to respond to what they think the possibilities of that technology might be. That’s where we are right now. We’ve done a lot of good stuff to date, but now we have to seize the opportunity presented by GenAI to go further, faster and do even better for our customers.

The 4th generation of Cora is very much about the shift to GenAI. At the beginning of June 2024, we launched Cora+, the first generative AI pilot which introduces that new technology into Cora for the first time. We hope to be able to answer a larger number of customer questions more succinctly and make fewer unnecessary hand-offs to colleagues.

And we’ll do that by leveraging the linguistic power of ChatGPT to improve the understanding and quality of every interaction. This is a really key development. Up until now, the use and understanding of language has been a uniquely human phenomenon. It’s what we use to connect with people, build relationships and engage with others. But it’s now possible for us to start using language in this way through our digital channels. And this will be really influential. 

The opportunities are endless.

GenAI Chatbots will have the ability to talk as well as to type. I think that’s a societal pattern we’re starting to see just now – I’ve certainly been getting a lot more voicenotes recently. And if that behaviour is turning up in the way people choose to interact with friends and family, then I think there’s a reasonable chance it will happen with the brands they interact with too.

The best banks of the future are going to leverage GenAI to leapfrog ahead when it comes to customer experience, engagement and outcomes. This technology has the potential to create simpler customer interactions, reducing the reliance on a touchscreen interface that we’ve had for the last 15 years.

As with any new technology, there are risks involved. Generative AI models have been trained in a subset of all of the publicly available data that’s out there in the world – the good and the bad. We must work with these models to harness all the inherent strength they bring to the way a conversation is understood – and then augment that with our own data.

However, GenAI has so many potential applications. We’re starting to experiment with it to help customers complete service-related tasks, but it could also help them to manage their money, plan for the future and understand what NatWest can do to help them with those goals. And it can be used to make colleagues’ jobs easier too. For example, how can GenAI be used to help make the handover from Cora to a colleague as slick as possible? Could it summarise the interaction in an easily digestible way? Or support by suggesting next steps? The opportunities are endless. We’re just at the start of this journey and I’m excited for the future.

The material published on this page is for information purposes only and should not be regarded as providing any specific advice, or used by consumers to make financial decision. Terms and conditions apply to any products or services mentioned.

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