Pilot designed to evaluate how automated chat experience can assist customers
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) announced today the company is
launching a pilot to test an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven
customer chat experience for Facebook Messenger.
Wells Fargo’s bot for Messenger is a pilot test and is part of the
company’s innovation agenda, which focuses on incorporating financial
services into third-party environments to meet customers where they are
and into the moments they want to use them. Initially, the pilot has
been opened to several hundred Wells Fargo team members. Later this
spring, Wells Fargo plans to invite a few thousand customers to
participate as the bank expands the testing environment.
“We’re very excited about the opportunity to provide more personalized
services for customers, and to bring those services directly to our
customers,” said Steve Ellis, head of Wells Fargo’s Innovation Group,
where the company’s Artificial Intelligence Enterprise Solutions team is
based. “Our goal is to deliver information ‘in the moment’ to help
customers make better informed financial decisions. AI technology allows
us to take an experience that would have required our customers to
navigate through several pages on our website, and turn it into a simple
conversation in a chat environment. That’s a huge time-saving
convenience for busy customers who are already frequent users of
Messenger.”
Wells Fargo has been providing assistance to its customers in Facebook
platforms since 2009.
In May 2016, the bank adopted Messenger as its main channel for
addressing customers’ common questions and service issues. The majority
of Wells Fargo’s customer engagements are now conducted on Messenger,
rather than its public Facebook News Feed, and the company estimates
that millions of Wells Fargo customers regularly use Messenger to
communicate with friends and family.
Regardless of how a customer chooses to do business with Wells Fargo,
innovation and technology will help the company deliver an outstanding
customer experience, build trust, and give more information to customers
to help them make decisions about their finances. As outlined in
February, artificial intelligence will be an area of focus for the San
Francisco-based bank’s Payments, Virtual Solutions and Innovation (PVSI)
group, as it sees an increasing number of opportunities to better
leverage data to provide personalized customer service through its
bankers and digital channels.
About Wells Fargo
Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE: WFC) is a diversified, community-based
financial services company with $1.9 trillion in assets. Founded in 1852
and headquartered in San Francisco, Wells Fargo provides banking,
insurance, investments, mortgage, and consumer and commercial finance
through more than 8,600 locations, 13,000 ATMs, the internet (wellsfargo.com)
and mobile banking, and has offices in 42 countries and territories to
support customers who conduct business in the global economy. With
approximately 269,000 team members, Wells Fargo serves one in three
households in the United States. Wells Fargo & Company was ranked No. 27
on Fortune’s 2016 rankings of America’s largest corporations. Wells
Fargo’s vision is to satisfy our customers’ financial needs and help
them succeed financially. News, insights and perspectives from Wells
Fargo are also available at Wells
Fargo Stories.