23 Nov 2010
Expert System, the leading provider of semantic software that searches, discovers, classifies and interprets text information, and H-Care, a division of the Pat Group, the international market leader in the development of innovative solutions for multi-channel customer service, announces the birth of “Sofia,” the virtual assistant of IWBank, which specializes in online banking and financial services.
Combining semantic technology and the Human Digital Assistant solution from H-care, the Pat Group was able to create an extremely innovative system that allows IWBank to not only improve its customer care services for the web, but also to generate new business opportunities, proactively and dynamically informing its customers regarding new products and services, as well as how to register, just like a real-life personal consultant.
Available initially in the financing section of http://www.iwbank.it/, Sofia interacts with the users in a completely automatic mode, thanks to the software’s ability to understand the natural language requests of its users. Speaking as you would with a human assistant, users can query Sofia in their normal, every day language. For example, users can ask questions like, “What are the current mortgage rates?” or “How can I request a loan?” The intelligence of Sofia is based on Expert System’s semantic software, which understands and analyzes the meanings of words and phrases with great precision. The software supplies the requested information accurately and in real time, and can also guide new users or those unfamiliar with financial services in general to other pages on the site for additional information.
Thanks to the Human Digital Assistant technology from H-care, Pat Group, the dialogue with Sofia is both dynamic and personalized, rendering a more useful and pleasant customer experience, especially when compared to other systems that use only a static textual interface.
“I see the corresponding success in the area of web finance in terms of quality of responses and accuracy of the suggestions it provides, in addition to a significant reduction in the number of telephone calls compared to the customer care services, IWBank has decided to increase the service to other sections of its public web site,” commented Vincenzo Tedeschi, marketing and product development manager of IWBank. “In addition, we are considering to extend the virtual assistant also to other services in the future.”
