UnionBank rolls out new tool to improve customer experience

MANILA, Philippines — Union Bank of the Philippines has unveiled an innovative tool that leverages data science and artificial intelligence (DSAI) to enable and accelerate better and more meaningful experiences for its customers.

Albert Cuadrante, chief marketing officer at UnionBank, said the bank takes delivering the best customer experience very seriously.

“To ensure our products, services and interactions across channels keep on delighting our customers, we make sure we continuously get feedback from them and we work closely with our data science and AI counterparts to help us analyze the vast data we get to allow us to keep on providing what our customers love and quickly address those that need improvement,” Cuadrante said.

The Aboitiz-led bank is also maximizing value creation when it comes to its products and services.

The country’s leading digital trailblazer said its Net Promoter Score (NPS) Free-Text Analysis Tool is powered by DSAI and could automate the identification of user needs and gains through direct feedback analysis.

The tool is an important consumer metric used by UnionBank to estimate the loyalty and satisfaction of its customers toward its products and services. Customers can rate the bank with a satisfaction score from zero to 10,  and give feedback or reviews to expound on their scores and recent experiences.

The solution is designed in a way that allows it to understand the sentiments of customers through free text found in various channels and platforms, such as the UnionBank Online mobile app or surveys answered in branches.

“The information that we are able to get from our various feedback channels, whether through online surveys, comments on social media and actual interviews, allow us to have more personalized offers and engagements with our different customers, ultimately deepening their relationship with us,” Cuadrante said.

Based on the tool’s performance over a period of eight months, UnionBank said it was able to streamline the analysis of more than 10,000 monthly survey responses and over 35,000 monthly inquiries and complaints from customers.

This has proven to be invaluable for the bank’s product teams in understanding customers’ key concerns and prioritizing actions to be implemented in a fast and efficient manner.

Adrienne Heinrich, head of AI and Innovation Center of Excellence at UnionBank, said it is challenging for humans to read thousands of feedback texts to understand its impact on customer experience.

“Technologies like NLP (Natural Language Processing) function best at manually extracting insights from big and unstructured data. The tool that we developed and deployed at UnionBank acts as a decision support system that helps with prioritizing and making more informed decisions,” Heinrich said.

To help the product teams analyze root causes and provide proactive recommendations that can help customers, the tool has an automated dashboard featuring sentiment analysis for reported customer experiences and product performance summaries, which is made readily available to the bank’s customer experience teams.

“Because of this, we were able to raise the bank’s NPS above its local competitors, and more importantly, leave more human-critical tasks to the bank’s employees, so they can ideate, communicate, and execute actions optimally,” Heinrich said.