Infobip, a global cloud communications platform and Blue Turtle Technologies have successfully completed the rollout of a WhatsApp-based chat banking platform at one of South Africa’s Big Four banks.
The platform which has been rolled out across nine African countries will ultimately improve and enrich customer engagement, cost efficiencies as well as streamlining the onboarding of clients for the financial institution.
Introducing the conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) component over WhatsApp Business API chat app enables customers to seamlessly interact with a chatbot over a messaging channel that they know and trust. The chatbot can provide information about product queries and respond to FAQs, among others.
Chatbots allow organisations to adopt an AI-first approach to more menial and mundane tasks, providing customers with self-service capabilities, while freeing up call centre agents. That way call centre agents can devote more time to strategic initiatives and deal with problems that create more value addition.
Partner Synergy
Shaun van Rooyen, Strategic Accounts and Partnerships Manager for Africa at Infobip, said there was a great degree of synergy between Infobip and Blue Turtle, which contributed to the successful completion of the chat banking project.
“Teaming up with Blue Turtle played neatly into Infobip’s strategy to take WhatsApp Business API into the large enterprise market via partners that have the expertise and skills to deliver Infobip’s services into those organisations” he said.
Best of breed
Blue Turtle’s decision to choose Infobip as a partner was largely driven by the company’s WhatsApp Business API offering which is seen as the best of breed API wrapper available, as well as a huge cost differentiator.
“They have a global and local footprint, which means they understand our market and what it’s like to do business here. Partnering with Infobip enabled us to offer chat banking over the most ubiquitous communication channel we have – WhatsApp,” says Byron Wolff, Product Manager for Digital at Blue Turtle.
Wolff adds, the Big Four bank is taking a phased approach to rolling out services on the platform, at first only offering conversational AI over the WhatsApp chat app. However, more is to come as soon as the financial institution links the chatbot with advanced natural language processing to its core banking system, it will switch on many new features.
“This will allow customers to do many more things, such as full banking transactions using natural language,” Wolff concluded.
