An artificial intelligence chat bot developed by IBM Services helped GM Financial process a large influx of customer requests at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic last year and remains an important tool in the company’s arsenal to this day.
The chat bot, referred to as ‘Nanci’ (derived from financial), helps GM Financial process customer messages and other requests through its website. The bot went live in late 2019 and by mid-April was helping to tackle almost half of all customer messages sent to GM Financial, Automotive News reports.
Nanci is capable of answering customer questions, helping customers that may need to make payment deferrals on their vehicle and providing information on their account with GM Financial, among more. The presence of the chat bot allowed GM Financial customer service employees to focus on processing customer calls to the institution, rather than focusing on the direct messages customers were sending through its website.
The implementation of Nanci was particularly helpful amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as many GM owners lost their jobs and needed to temporarily defer payments. The chat bot was able to give advice to those customers and tell them how deferring payments might affect their account.
“We used our bot to really inform customers when they typed in, ‘I need a deferment or payment extension on a retail account’ the bot would explain, ‘This is how deferment works,’ ” he Bob Beatty, chief customer experience officer at GM Financial, told AN in a recent interview. “I think that helped a lot of customers make more sound decisions.”
Going forward, GM Financial hopes to work with IBM Web Services to make Nanci even more advanced and process mroe complex customer requests. The company also hopes to one day give Nanci a Siri-style voice so she can also answer customer calls, taking even more pressure off the human customer service team at GM Financial.
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Comment
Standard stuff for a service desk these days. Calling it AI is pushing the definition to the max.