Learning a new craft at ING: designing chatbots!
At ING it’s not about how good you are. It's about how good you want to be. This applies to everyone, from interns to senior managers. By sharing knowledge. By honing your skills. By networking. By thinking outside the box and providing surprising contributions.
Like our two-day chatbot hackathon in Brussels. Twenty-five talented and enthusiastic ING colleagues from Belgium, Poland, Romania, the Netherlands and the ING group shared their knowledge, insights and professional craftsmanship.
A chatbot provides a solution
“More digitization means more interaction with various applications. However, it does not replace the need for talking.” Pieter Goderis, head of the Centre of Expertise Customer Dialogue & Virtual Assistants.
“We expect that 25% of the interactions with applications will be speech-driven within the next four years. This means that the everyday use of virtual assistants at the workplace will quickly grow.”
“Chatbots are developing rapidly. Soon, you will not only be able to ask questions by typing, but by means of speech. This hackathon for chatbots was a giant stride forwards in preparing us for the future!”
In four years’ time 25% of all interactions with applications will be speech-driven.
Knowledge-sharing
What do you get when you combine the sharing of knowledge with an eagerness to learn new competencies? In this case: a competition. The teams wanted to make life easier by providing an automated and simple solution for answering questions or resolving incidents.
Example: How many Lion Accounts were opened last month? How do you help a new colleague learn the ropes during their first days on the job? How do you solve a problem during a telephone conversation or a chat session?
Each of these questions requires another type of chatbot. An analytic chatbot that converts language into SQL statements, of course. An HR onboarding assistant. Assisted channels. Legal bots. To name just a few.
Presentation of the projects
At the end of the two-day session, our colleagues were given the opportunity to show the group and the management what they had achieved. Next, everyone was invited to vote on what they thought was the best project.
Co-creation
This event was organised by our colleagues of the 1-1 Analytics Tribe. They gave ING employees from a variety of disciplines (e.g. HR, Omnichannel, Assisted channels, Legal, FM and 1-1 Analytics) an opportunity to become better acquainted with chatbots.
Together with the Customer Dialogue Analytics CoE they presented a workshop on the worldwide virtual assistant platform and a training session about Dialogflow. All of this was done with help from Dries Leclercq, an expert in the field.