Banks have long been hurt by their ability to effectively communicate with their customers and the current crisis has only exacerbated that problem; virtual assistants have started to become the norm and Turkey’s Isbank has found a lot of success with Maxi; the virtual assistant first debuted in November 2018 and was recently updated to help customers navigate loans deferments and Covid related updates from the bank; Isbank uses conversational AI startup Clinc who helped to develop Maxi; 14 focus groups were formed to help provide the basis for the traits and skills customers wanted in a virtual assistant, they gathered more than 10,000 sentences and 220,000 words; “These models need lots of data that represent how people would talk to it,” said Johann Hauswald, Chief Customer Officer and Co-Founder of Clinc, to American Banker. “Crowdsourcing gives you diversity and coverage as to how people could potentially ask about a topic. The better your data and models, the higher your understanding of what customers are asking.”; more than six million customers use Maxi and they saw a 70 percent jump from February to April as the crisis took hold. American Banker
