İşbank’s Virtual Assistant Maxi Has Responded to More Than 1 Million Customer Inquiries Related To COVID-19

Turkey’s largest private bank İşbank’s virtual assistant Maxi, available on mobile banking and payment apps İşCep and Maximum Mobil, developed with conversational AI technology leader Clinc, has answered more than 1 million customer questions related to COVID-19 in a one month period, which represents a 62% increase in usage. Maxi’s well-polished conversational skills, rooted in Clinc’s Natural Language Processing (NLP), deep learning and AI technologies, is crucial to İşbank’s ability to deliver a personalized experience that keeps customers informed about their finances and calm during these unsettling times. 

İşbank has more than 8.2 million mobile banking customers and 5.7 million of them have used Maxi. Maxi offers İşbank customers a voice-activated, intelligent personal assistant in native Turkish that can answer financial questions unique to each individual user; offering personalized spending advice and fulfilling any transactional banking task. Because of Clinc’s sophisticated technology that identifies and analyzes dozens of factors like speech patterns, word structure and sentiment, Maxi can understand, remember and respond to unconstrained, contextual, messy language, more closely emulating a human interaction. 

As COVID-19 became a life-threatening pandemic in Turkey, İşbank proactively took many precautions by prioritizing both customers and its employee’s health. After less than a week of training, Maxi could answer queries related to items like COVID-19’s impact on credit card debt and loan debt postponement, and successfully managed the increased query load with no slowdown. The Clinc AI platform enabled Maxi’s unprecedentedly fast time to market with new COVID-19 competencies, especially for a virtual assistant in a different language. More than 235,000 customers asked Maxi more than 1 million COVID-19 related questions – representing 22% of all queries Maxi received during this period, making Maxi an important alternative to face-to-face customer communications. 

“Every moment in a customer’s journey matters, and our ability to serve our customers at the right time and at the right place with a meaningful, informative experience is of utmost importance—especially during the COVID-19 pandemic as people increasingly check on their finances. Because we had Maxi already deployed, we were in the fortunate position to respond to pandemic-related inquiries extremely quickly and provide our customers with the peace of mind they need,” said Halim Memiş, Channel Strategy Unit Manager at Digital Banking, İşbank. “Maxi has also been a tremendous source of relief for our call center, which has seen an increase in traffic over the past month. We were able to act quickly and provide customers with the experience they expect from us because of Clinc’s powerful conversational AI technology.”

Clinc is the world leader in conversational AI research and its application for the enterprise. Clinc enables brands like İşbank to have more effective conversations with their customers than ever before, taking one big step forward in creating a truly frictionless customer experience. The Clinc AI Platform, which Maxi is built upon, is a next-generation, end-to-end conversational AI solution enabling organizations to build remarkable AI, deploy it to real users and monitor its success. 

“Clinc’s conversational AI can relieve the immense pressure that has been put on customer success teams because of COVID-19. By letting technology handle more preliminary inquiries, customer support personnel can spend their time on more advanced requests that demand person-to-person communications. With this division of labor, customers receive the support they need during this stressful time,” said Dr. Johann Hauswald, Chief Customer Officer and Co-Founder, Clinc. “What İşbank is doing with Maxi is a truly revolutionary step in virtual assistant technology. I predict other banking leaders will follow suit and use this time to reevaluate their current continuity plans to integrate AI tools to keep customers connected – even from a distance – without any sacrifices to the quality of service.”

For more information about Maxi, please visit: www.clinc.com/maxi. For more about Clinc’s conversational AI capabilities, please visit: www.clinc.com/technology. 

About İşbank

With its solid capital base reinforced by sustained profitability, İşbank is the largest private bank in Turkey in terms of shareholders’ equity, which amounted to TL 58.5 billion ($ 9.0 billion) as of March 2020. İşbank also ranks first in terms of total assets, total loans and total deposits among privately owned banks in Turkey. İşbank posted TL 1.5 billion ($ 0.22 billion) net profit in the first three months of 2020 and the Bank’s capital adequacy ratio stood at 18.4% at the end of March 2020.

İşbank’s payment systems solutions allow businesses to make payments in 38 different payment methods in over 50 countries, as well as the world’s largest card processing companies such as Visa, MasterCard, American Express, UnionPay, JCB, Discover and MIR. In this sense, İşbank’s physical and virtual POS member merchants are also able to accept almost all international cards in the world and alternative payment methods, which are widely used in Europe, United States, Latin America and Far East.

About Clinc

Clinc’s groundbreaking Conversational AI technology has created the most sophisticated virtual assistants for banking and an industry-leading platform for building AI that feels like talking to a human in the room. Clinc’s technology has seen an average 95% containment rate and 82% customer satisfaction (CSAT) in production to over 10 million end-users with virtual assistants that support messy language and complex multi-turn conversational flows. Clinc is partnered with tier 1 financial institutions across the world including Isbank, OCBC, and Visa, helping them provide their customers superior conversational and automated self-service solutions. Learn more at clinc.com.