Understanding mutual funds, deciding the best options for investments and even redeeming them can be challenging for customers from a non-financial background or those embarking on their investment voyage.
Though companies often display plenty of information about their mutual fund products on their website, customers still find it difficult to comprehend it and get the precise information they require.
Realising this, Tata Mutual Fund (TMF) sought to make it easier and effortless for its existing and prospective customers to understand the nuances of mutual funds.
It selected Haptik, a conversational AI company and a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, to create an Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) that could replicate the content available on their site and offer it in an interactive way to answer customer queries.
“Having realized that we’re moving into a world driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning, deploying conversational AI was the obvious next step in our product roadmap. What really excited us was that Haptik wasn’t just a chatbot platform, it offered a full stack of services, which included analytics, bot-builder, multi-channel integration, and integration with WhatsApp,” said MVS Murthy, Head – Marketing and Digital, Tata Asset Management Limited.
To improve the IVA’s capabilities and enhance its final conversational impact, Haptik engaged in a holistic research process, starting by building an algorithmic capability to scan, interpret and contextualize TMF’s existing digital information.
It then reviewed the company’s call centre data and identified cohorts of standard queries to address the quartile with the most common inquiries.
The result was ‘Prof. Simply Simple’ – a chatbot with capability of resolving almost 70% of queries otherwise handled by TMF’s customer support team. Talking how they achieved this, Haptik’s spokespeople said that while reviewing TMF’s call centre data, their team found that majority of the incoming queries centred on account information, NAV updates, valuations, buying funds, and SIP purchase and redemptions.
It collated this data over three months to develop an IVA that could swiftly and seamlessly resolve these predictable and repetitive queries, freeing the customer support team to solve complex queries instead. Additionally, for NAV notifications, Haptik proposed the deployment of an IVA on WhatsApp.
Kartik Poddar, SVP and Business Head, Haptik added, “This IVA is a typical example of how conversational AI can help enterprises optimize processes to reduce cost and increase ROI. Mutual funds investment is a complex domain and apart from resolving support queries, the virtual assistant also helps with investor education using Haptik’s intelligent prompts and content flows. While support automation is the first step, we will enable transactions in the next phase, thus making ‘Prof Simply Simple’ truly an intelligent virtual assistant.”
