Nordic Bank Nordea Employs Conversational AI to Scale Customer Service Across Four Markets

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Nordea, a leading Nordic bank, was facing a significant challenge in managing the growing volume of customer service requests across its operations in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland. The bank, which serves over 9 million private customers and more than 500,000 active corporate customers, was receiving thousands of customer service requests daily through various channels including in-person, phone, email, and both live and automated chat. In 2017, Nordea’s Norwegian operation was receiving upwards of 2 million contacts per year across three contact center locations staffed by approximately 150 FTEs. The bank needed a scalable solution to manage this volume while providing consistent and on-brand experiences. They also identified a preference among their customer base to interact via chat, which had the advantage of handling multiple inquiries simultaneously.

Nordea is a leading Nordic bank with operations spanning Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland. Founded in 1820, the bank serves over 9 million private customers and more than 500,000 active corporate customers across these four markets. Nordea offers a varied channel mix of customer service touchpoints via in-person, phone, email, and both live and automated chat. The bank was receiving thousands of customer service requests daily, and in 2017, Nordea’s Norwegian operation alone was receiving upwards of 2 million contacts per year across three contact center locations staffed by approximately 150 FTEs.

Nordea partnered with boost.ai to develop a virtual agent powered by conversational AI. Named Nova, the virtual agent was designed to nudge customers towards the chat channel. The development process involved building a model for the virtual agent based on boost.ai’s pre-built module of common banking-related topics, which Nordea could layer its brand-specific content on top of. Today, Nova can answer questions on more than 2,300 banking topics related to private and business banking, and averages around 50,000 conversations each month with private banking customers. Nova was initially used to answer general questions on the bank’s ‘open pages’, but since 2021, it has been more fully integrated, allowing customers that are logged into the net bank via desktop or its app to be guided to a number of self-service functions. Nordea currently has 12 virtual agents in production on the boost.ai platform, operating in each market’s local language.

• The implementation of Nova, the AI-powered virtual agent, has significantly improved Nordea's customer service operations. The virtual agent has enabled better self-service for customers, guiding them to the information they need without having to search Nordea’s website or speak to a human. This has freed up the bank’s support staff to focus on more complex customer inquiries that may require additional attention and care. The bank's chat-first approach, with Nova as the first point of contact for customer service via chat across all its markets, has been positively received by customers. Over 50% of customers report that they get the help they need from the chatbot. The success of Nova has led to Nordea deploying 12 virtual agents across four markets, pioneering the use of artificial intelligence for digital customer service in banking.

• Nova, the virtual agent, can answer questions on more than 2,300 banking topics and averages around 50,000 conversations each month with private banking customers.

• Approximately 50% of these conversations are handled solely by the virtual agent, with no assistance from a human agent.

• Nova has an in-scope resolution rate of 95%, where the user has found the answers they were looking for and had an experience comparable to that of a human agent having answered the same question.