How Virgin Money is Humanising Digital Experiences with AI

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Today, every company is selling a digital experience – and competition is fierce. Hyper-personalisation is the new high bar for success, as customers demand relevant suggestions and seamless service. But bespoke service is not enough. Customer experiences must also be intuitive, offering people something helpful without them having to ask for it.

Generative AI is taking these expectations to unprecedented heights, but it’s also giving companies the tools to meet them.

One industry that has been fast out of the blocks on AI transformation is banking. Amid disruption from a new breed of digital-first banks and platform business, high street banks are doubling down on technology to stay relevant for their customers.

IBM’s latest Global AI Adoption Index found that 31% of financial services professionals are already applying AI to customer services. And in a recent IBM survey of global banking executives, 26% said customer engagement is where gen AI unlocks the greatest value for the business, after risk and compliance at 36%.

Why? Because with gen AI, banks can finally create truly hyper-personalised customer journeys and explode the value proposition for customers. Instead of limited chatbots that need you to think of all the right questions, we can build virtual agents that anticipate your needs and serve up the right suggestions. It’s a more intuitive experience from a more intelligent assistant, that can even be trained to speak in the brand’s authentic voice, in multiple different languages.

Seizing the gen AI opportunity

Virgin Money, a top six UK bank with 6.6m retail and business customers, was quick to recognise the gen AI opportunity and how it could help them achieve their ambition to be the UK’s best digital bank. Working with our team at IBM Consulting, Virgin Money kicked off their conversational AI strategy starting with the Virgin Money credit card business.

For customers unable to fulfil their query online, telephone was the typical alternative for the bank’s credit card customer services, along with its stores. But the traditional contact centre model and customer expectations have evolved.  Virgin Money needed a solution that would relieve some of the contact centre team’s call volume and resolve customer queries as completely and quickly as possible – without losing the warmth and personality of the Virgin Money brand voice.

From chatbot to intelligent agent

IBM Consulting recommended an AI-powered conversational assistant for the Virgin Money mobile app. This assistant, named Redi, would use natural language understanding to converse with customers in a way that marks a big leap forward from the chatbots of yesterday. It would draw upon a range of data to make intelligent, proactive suggestions. And crucially, it would convey the warmth, humanity and friendliness of the Virgin Money brand.

It was also important for Redi to be able to easily integrate into the bank’s core systems and existing Microsoft technology stack, which would help to get it up and running quickly and more cost efficiently. To address this, the IBM team built Redi on a full-stack, Microsoft-powered digital host on Power Virtual Agents (now part of the Microsoft Copilot Suite) and Bot Framework Composer solutions hosted on Virgin Money’s private cloud environment.

Led by IBM Consulting’s dedicated team of Microsoft Copilot experts, this work is a testament to our “better together” approach with Microsoft – bringing clients the technology and expertise they need to drive business success.

Driving up customer engagement – and satisfaction

Virgin Money launched Redi in March  2023, allowing customers to self-serve based on more than 70 queries in the credit card app and make account updates, such as increasing credit limits, through in-app chat. Redi can also create proactive messages for users in the app with account updates, such as when their card is due to expire.

Since going live, Redi has seen significant customer engagement, with more than 80,000 conversations in the first month and more than 1.5m customer interactions to date. It is now available for 1.6 million customers, 72% of whom have used it.

It is striking that Redi has contained over 50% of customer interactions at peak times, substantially reducing call center traffic. The AI-powered virtual assistant has also helped increase the credit card application’s smile score – its NPS customer satisfaction rating – to one of the highest in the bank.

Redi for expansion

The results have exceeded all expectations – and we’re just getting started.

Virgin Money has also been working with IBM Consulting to transform its Personal Current Account chatbot. The new solution, which launched this month, builds upon the virtual assistant capabilities developed in Redi using Microsoft technologies and advance the bank’s ultimate aim of offering a single, consistent customer experience across all Virgin Money products.

Generative AI is here to stay, and the possibilities are endless. Especially when working with an open ecosystem of partners who can deliver across a company’s technology needs.

Is your business ready?