Nordea adopts AI chatbot strategy to scale customer service

By Gloria Methri

Nordea bank has employed ‘virtual agents‘ to improve customer enquiry resolution rates for increased client satisfaction. The virtual agents are designed to resolve most customer-facing queries without the need for human intervention.

Nova, Nordea’s first-line customer-facing virtual agent, averages over 220,000 conversations per month across the Nordics, for private banking customers. Of the total customer interactions, the bank claims a 91% resolution rate for private banking customers and a 95% resolution rate for corporate customers.

The bank, having over 9 million private customers and more than 500,000 active corporate accounts, chose the Boost.ai platform, which is currently used by nine of the 10 largest Scandinavian banks.

In a change of strategy, Nordea has adopted a chat-first approach to banking across all markets, meaning that all online customer queries are first received by a chatbot. The company states that over 50% of customers are satisfied with the help they get from this initial interaction. If a query cannot be resolved by a virtual agent, a transition to a human agent takes place.

Sanjeev Kumar, VP EMEA at Boost.ai, said, “Nordea presents a perfect example of how much simpler, more effective, and more successful banking can be if financial institutions understand the impact conversational AI can have. By adopting this technology, banks can save millions of minutes in customer time while simultaneously improving the consumer experience.”

Mattias Fras, Group Head of AI Hub at Nordea, stated, “For banks, AI is going to be transformative across a wide range of applications. At Nordea, we acknowledge the importance of a scalable chatbot strategy that the boost.ai platform enables. It is a key component towards human-centered digital transformation.”

Today, the bank uses 12 different virtual agents across four Nordic markets, powered by natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) algorithms.