Client story: Spar Nord
Using AI to cut emails handled by customer service by 50%
Applying AI solutions to save time and keep high customer satisfaction
Spar Nord Bank are a full-service commercial bank headquartered in North Jutland, with 88 local banks throughout the country. They seek to improve their customers’ experience by combining personal advice and service with up-to-date and innovative digital offers which help them speed up their response rate.
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The challenge
At Spar Nord, front-line customer service managers spent a lot of time sorting emails and forwarding more complex customer requests to the financial advisors.
Spar Nord executives wanted to explore how they could use technology to serve their customers better, improve efficiency, reduce costs, and compete in an increasingly digital marketplace.
The project’s main goal was to find a way to save time spent on emails by customer support, while keeping customer satisfaction high.
The solution
For Spar Nord, we developed an AI algorithm that can handle the increasing number of email queries. By screening incoming emails based on a learning dataset of emails previously received, the algorithm is able to determine whether to forward them to customer service or financial advisors.
The algorithm cuts the number of emails that the customer service team needs to handle manually by 50%, which significantly cuts costs and dramatically increases the speed of execution and efficiency at Spar Nord’s service desk.
Spar Nord and 2021.AI worked together to:
- Apply AI solutions in customer support scenarios
- Automate the sorting and forwarding of the emails to the right employees
- Save Spar Nord the costs of hiring additional customer service personnel
- Accelerate the processing of queries from customers, improving their satisfaction levels with the bank’s support desk
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We went from challenge to implementation and actual cost savings in a very short time span. We received an algorithm that was clean and easy to implement in less than a week. The collaboration with 2021.AI showed us that AI is the key for Spar Nord to remain competitive in the future.
The results
In the early stage of the project, 2021.AI consultants provided insightful AI advisories and guidance to Spar Nord on how to apply AI solutions in the customer support scenarios. In the next phase, 2021.AI’s data scientists developed an algorithm from scratch, adding the power of automation and AI to direct incoming email queries to the right employee, customer service.
When 2021.AI professionals delivered the algorithm to Spar Nord’s IT department, they successfully deployed it into production in a few days. They now own the algorithm, while the entire customer service team benefit from the successfully implemented AI project.
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Project highlights
- 2021.AI’s experts leveraged natural language processing
- Leveraging the enterprise AI platform, Grace, accelerated time to market, helping the project to scale and providing
a common workspace for development - The deployed algorithm cut the number of emails manually handled by customer service in half.
About Spar Nord
Spar Nord Bank A/S, established in 1824 under the name “Bye og Omegns Sparekasse” (The Savings Bank for Town and County), provide financial services to household customers as well as small and medium-sized companies in the private and public sector. Their portfolio includes deposits, loans, mortgage credits, services in the area of the trade market, forex, and asset management, as well as other financial products and services. Based in Aalborg, Denmark, the company operate through roughly 50 branches in 31 bank regions, serving over 400,000 customers.