Credit Suisse has employed chatbot lady Amelia since the end of last year. An analysis of her work shows how efficient she is.

Credit Suisse CEO Tidjane Thiam, always eager to cut costs at Switzerland’s second-largest bank, is an avid supporter of digital wizardry and robotic help. His vision is an army of digital helpers numbering 400 worldwide. And while the robo-helpers still need some fine-tuning, they are constrained to working internally.

Amelia is an example in case, a chatbot much like her more prominent cousins, Alexa (Amazon) and Siri (Apple). In February, Credit Suisse had announced that it had launched Amelia for internal purposes, at the global service desk. She helps with crashed computers, forgotten passwords and full email inboxes. Comparatively simple stuff, but issues that generate about half of all support requests at the bank.

Way to Go

How easily did Amelia deal with the requests? A question that the «Retail Banking Blog» at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences tackled. The sobering conclusion: the service was launched in December of 2017 (see video clip below). By July, Amelia had learned to deal with 13 percent of all requests automatically, ie without the help of a human being.

The robolady has some way to go before she reaches the 40 percent target rate. Credit Suisse one day aims to solve as much as 70 percent of all requests automatically.

As Good as 13 Humans...

At the beginning, Amelia only understood 23 percent of all requests. She learned fairly quickly and today understands four out of five requests.

The number that some Credit Suisse staff may read with dread: on some days, Amelia dealt with a workload otherwise performed by 13 human members of staff. Thiam will surely have taken note.