Bankia boosts customer service with Google Assistant

GFT hosted a workshop to define the minimum viable proposition for the project.

This included detailed definitions of customer journeys, priority set up, a definition of depth and reach of conversation and definitions of new functionalities.

Most importantly, clear use cases were defined, based on real customer behaviour, using information from the most popular requests for information from the Bankia website.

Including:

• Finding branches and ATMs. 
• Nominating a branch as “my favourite” and obtaining additional information, such as opening times, address, telephone number, calling the bank.
• Connecting to Bankia’s website for information on specific financial products – it involves being able to identify the product requested by the user and then directing the user to the relevant product page on Bankia’s website.
• Connecting to mobile banking for transactional operations, such as checking balance, viewing transactions and executing transfers.
• Responding to inappropriate language.

The conversational design also contemplates the situation in which the user would start a conversation in Google Home, where voice is the only interaction channel, and is able to direct the conversation to the virtual assistant if visual support is required.

This phase involved implementation of all of the above dialogue flows and usability testing. Testing identified opportunities for improvement and enabled the solution to be aligned exactly with real-world needs. User testing also allowed Bankia staff to become familiar with the solution. Following extensive testing, Bankia launched the solution.

From the outset the Bankia solution has followed an iteration cycle, which delivers continuous improvement. In this way, the solution can offer more informative answers to customer questions. The bank regularly reviews questions that are most frequently posed to the virtual assistant and streamlines access to this information.

The information generated by the system is also a useful management tool.

Before the final deployment to production, GFT executed active testing of the solution. The aim of this activity is to validate the usability of the solution by asking users to interact with it as they would do in a real-life scenario. While the user interacts with the solution, all their movements and reactions are followed in real time by a team of observers (product owner, project manager, designers, developers and other stakeholders) sitting in a separate room. This phase provides valuable input to ensure the solution meets requirements in terms of usability, as well as to identify possible improvements.