A new virtual employee at Desjardins

She is able, with a single sentence rather than four or five automated choices, to deal with thousands of customers every day. She can replace a lost credit card, apply for a personal loan or an RRSP, change an address or reset a password. And she understands Quebec French.

Karim Benessaieh
The Press

This small revolution carried out without fanfare since last December at Desjardins is that of the implementation of a new virtual assistant, designed in collaboration with Google based on the analysis of 5,000 hours of anonymized conversations. One in two Desjardins members who contact customer service by telephone, the AccèsD service, come across this virtual assistant, who has not yet inherited a nickname. It correctly directs or carries out itself the four requests specified above, which The Press confirmed by testing it, but stopping before the final step. For more complex or unusual requests, no miracle: she sends you to an advisor, sometimes without further details for those she does not understand.

The Quebec challenge

At Desjardins, it is estimated that this assistant understands 96.8% of the words spoken, in Quebec natural language rather than in French from France, as was the case with the old system which only included 40% of the statements.

While it took an average of 140 seconds and sometimes tedious navigation between four or five numbered choices, we went “to a few seconds” for the most popular operations, rejoices Annie-Claude Jutras, Senior Director, Transformation of customer relations at Desjardins.

“It all started with a major irritant that our members were experiencing: the large number of options in our telephone menus,” she explains in an interview. We asked ourselves the question: how could we remove this burden? How could we create a virtual assistant who would understand the requests of the members? »

The Quebec accent “can be complicated,” she notes, and the virtual assistants generally available on the market do not understand its subtleties. That’s where Google came in, applying its deep learning models of voice recognition to 5,000 hours of recorded conversations with willing customers, from which all personally identifiable information was redacted. Google had a head start in this regard, its voice assistant having been, in 2017, the first to master Quebec French. Four other partners and a hundred employees took part in the operation, which began 18 months ago.

“When we talked about this project, virtual assistants were nothing new,” says Johanne Duhaime, Senior Vice-President, Information Technologies, at Desjardins.

This tool could be offered by Google to other Quebec companies, she says.

No position abolished

First indication of the usefulness of the virtual assistant: a marked reduction in irritating transfers from one service to another. “The member sometimes did not choose the right menu”, notes M^me Jutras. The comments of the members who come across this assistant are “very positive”, she reports. “People find it easy to use, user-friendly, adds M.^me Duhaime. I wanted to try it myself, and it works wonderfully. »

But why not just go back to the good old way where real human beings took customer calls? The Vice-President recalls that financial services, at Desjardins as in other institutions, have changed enormously in recent decades. “This is a project to improve services to our members. We want to use technology to liberate our people […]. We want to use our advisors and agents to bring added value. »

None of the 8,500 “front-line employee” positions, mainly assigned to customer service, will be abolished, she assures. “Our agents will continue to be there, their tasks will be enriched. »