UK’s Nationwide analyses customer interactions with SAS
Nationwide, the UK’s largest building society, is using SAS tech to analyse customer interactions for problem solving.
Nationwide aims to make you this happy with proper customer service
A proof of concept (PoC) was able to establish “significant” inefficiencies as more than half of all email enquiries could be resolved instead by guiding members towards digital channels.
The SAS solutions comprise artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to help companies identify elements of customer communication that could be improved.
Graeme Reed, senior manager of analytics at Nationwide, remarks: “Our recent growth has put pressure on our contact centre, which now receives over 800,000 calls every month. We needed to investigate how we could improve other communication channels to reduce call volumes.”
In the PoC, the analysts identified the root cause of each email enquiry, whether the query was resolved, and how many emails were exchanged in the process.
Sentiment analysis from the SAS solutions helped Nationwide to detect the member’s mood. For instance, unsurprisingly, analysts identified that people’s moods worsen as the number of emails rises.
It established that over half of the emails could have been avoided entirely.
The partnership with SAS was able to identify a number of different solutions for customers, depending on the precise nature of the request.
For example, many members get in touch for proof of travel insurance obtained via the FlexPlus current account. The documents are available on the website – but the society says it aims to make them easier to find.
Members also often ask for a paper statement, because online statements do not contain sufficient personal information to function as proof of address. By tweaking the statement format, the bank says it can eliminate these requests.
Recently, Rosbank, a Russian bank controlled by Societe Generale, said it was testing emotion recognition technology at its call centres, with the support of AI start-up Neurodata Lab.
