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RBC Financial Group
RBC Virtual Agents
"Hello, Let Me Show You How Easy It Is To Do Online Transactions."
Challenge
Royal Bank of Canada and its subsidiaries operate under the brand name RBC. It is Canada's largest bank, with about 70,000 full- and part-time employees, more than 18,000 of whom work in Global Technology Operations (GTO). This group is responsible for direct client sales and service, project implementation, channel delivery, process excellence and innovation.
Solution
Royal Bank clients who want to do certain transactions electronically, such as paying their bills, can go to a site such as www.rbcroyalbank.com/billpayments/index.html and receive step-by-step interactive advice from a person. Well, she looks and acts like a person. Her name is May, and she is an avatar.
An avatar is a stock animated character. May has been brought to life by technology. She has a welcoming, professional manner. Her facial expressions and gestures match her speech in a very lifelike way. She even blinks like a real person.
Sometimes she moves closer to the viewer, to emphasize a point she is making, and she often pauses, giving viewers time to absorb the print information that's also on the screen. She points to the text she is talking about, and highlights and circles it. Nevertheless, the viewer, not the avatar, sets the pace and can pause a presentation or go forward or back at any time.
May speaks French and English and will soon speak Cantonese.
The character that became May was designed by CodeBaby Corp. of Edmonton. It creates and sells avatars and also sells CodeBaby Production Studio, a platform with all the tools required to modify the avatars and bring them to life in whatever settings the designers choose.
GTO acquired the platform and a male and female avatar and created May, along with another character called Matt. This involved using traditional animation development and video recording, overlaid by Flash customized animation software to make the characters even more realistic.
Results
So far, May is the star. The first version of May appeared in a promotional presentation for the RBC Next Innovator Challenge, a contest for students. She led viewers through a questionnaire called "What Kind of Innovator Are You?" and encouraged them to enter the contest.
In January 2007, May appeared in online demonstrations of two services, RBC Electronic Statements and RBC Bill Pay. In the first six months, those sites had 20,858 and 26,108 client visits, respectively. May was also part of RBC CEO Gord Nixon's presentation at the 2007 annual general meeting.
Her future appearances will include presentations for RBC Insurance and RBC Business Express and, for bank staff, training modules for RBC Direct Investing and federally mandated health and safety instruction.
GTO is evaluating the idea of having May instruct online investing clients. Another possibility is that virtual agents could help clients execute transactions within the online banking secure channel.
Matt has appeared once to date, at the 2006 RBC convention, explaining GTO projects and services and presenting a key contact-centre technology.
Use of avatars appears to increase clients' adoption of online services. For the two services now featuring May, 40 per cent of viewers got to the core message and 30 per cent stayed to completion during the first six months, more than meeting RBC's expectations for keeping clients engaged.
Innovative Use of Technology
RBC is the first major financial institution in North America to deploy these types of virtual agents.
To use the Codebaby platform effectively, GTO developed a new requirements-and-design process to optimize production, created a streamlined flow and mimimized its Web-development integration effort. To enable even more human-like interactions than provided by the platform, RBC designers improved on the canned animations by applying an animation layering process.
A 2007 CIPA Winner!
For its excellent application of information technology to create clear, simple client services and processes and bring benefits to its stakeholders, RBC Financial Group has been awarded a 2007 CIPA Silver Award of Excellence in the Customer Centricity, For Profit category.
Technology partners
Adobe Systems Inc.
CodeBaby Corp.
IBM Canada Ltd.
Microsoft Canada Co.
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