OCTOBER 2019CIOAPPLICATIONSEUROPE.COM8IN MYOPINIONHOW RECENT TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENTS AND TRANSFORMATIONS OF TECHNOLOGIES IN THE IBM DOMAIN HAVE BEEN IMPACTING THE BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT: CREVAL'S EXPERIENCEMATTEO PIZZICOLI , DIRECTOR OF BANKIG ORGANIZATION AND INNOVATION , CREVAL BANKCreval bank uses IBM Watson to serve customers better Creval is a midsized bank in Italy that differentiates itself from its competitors through its attention to customer service and satisfaction. We are very focused on customer delight and the customer relationship; the best way to delight our customers is to focus on service efficiency and cost reduction at the same time. What differentiates Creval is that we provide answers quickly to our customers.Over the past several years, Creval has invested in cutting-edge technology to support and automate many of its internal and external processes. For example, the department uses IBM Business Process Manager systems for its Agile business process management (BPM) processes, allowing it to release new banking solutions in less than four hours. We had also made major investments in cognitive systems such as IBM Watson Analytics® technology to explore the big data in our CRM systems. Our approach to continuous evolution in IBM's Technology: we had introduced, time by time, three different waves of new technology, that we had defined "Agility in Processes" (blue wave), "Open Banking" (red wave) and "Cognitive and AI" (green wave).On these technologies, we have developed many projects, some of which have obtained the Innovation Award from the Italian Banking Association in the last years.At some point, we concluded that many of our processes, thanks to our technology stack, were very easy and very fast.However, some internal processes, such as the bank's service desk support for bank branch employees, were neither automated nor efficient. We wanted to focus on creating a solution to reduce or even eliminate the human effort in some of our more repetitive service desk support processes so that our people could concentrate on the processes that add the most value to the bank--the ones that support its customers. Introducing Alfredo, the AI virtual assistantCreval created an online virtual assistant and named it Alfredo, after Alfred the butler in the Batman comic series. Alfredo is now the single point of contact for branch users to request help from the organisation's service desk. It's not a simple chatbot, but rather the first operator that users turn to with questions or for the problem-solving. Alfredo interacts through chat, where it can interpret Italian natural language and provide textual feedback or activate applications. Alfredo can understand requests in any banking sector. If Alfredo cannot answer a question, it relegates them to a service desk colleague, but only if necessary. Alfredo uses WatsonTM technologies, including the IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding service and IBM Watson Assistant solution, running on the IBM CloudTM platform, to clarify and classify questions, to provide answers for the most frequent and easily resolved inquiries, and to redirect more difficult and complex questions to the specialised personnel that can solve them. Creval trained Alfredo on 14 knowledge domains of the bank. All service desk requests now go through Alfredo, which can provide approximately 1,300 autonomous responses, without human intervention. When human help is needed,
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