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Designing Jeanie: The story behind Fifth Third’s virtual banking assistant
October 07, 2024 • 5 minutes
Imagine an AI chatbot that behaves more like an agent than an interactive FAQ page, one that can accurately understand what online banking customers want to know or do — no matter how they phrase their questions — instead of forcing them to navigate a limited menu of preset options.
A virtual banking assistant with an incredible 95% accuracy, resulting in faster service for customers and less strain for agents.
Jeanie does just that.
Founded in 1858, Fifth Third Bank is the 12th largest bank in the US, with headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was the first bank to launch a shared online network of ATMs — named Jeanie — in the US. Today Jeanie is better known as Fifth Third’s virtual banking assistant, and provides support to customers performing everyday banking tasks across its digital channels.
No one knows this virtual assistant better than Alex Henline, Lead Product Owner at Fifth Third, who has led the transformation of Jeanie from basic FAQ bot to versatile customer service agent.
Bringing Jeanie 2.0 to life
Fifth Third started working with LivePerson in 2018 to explore ways to incorporate messaging capabilities into the banking experience, with the latest iteration of their virtual banking assistant, Jeanie, launching in May 2020 to help address high call volumes during the pandemic.
“Jeanie 1.0 could provide step-by-step instructions to do certain tasks, but didn’t always provide the right answers to customers’ questions and sometimes connected them to agents when it wasn’t necessary,” says Alex.
Today, Jeanie is able to respond to over 150 intents and 30,000 phrases with over 95% accuracy, and contains 40% of conversations — thanks in part to Fifth Third’s data science team, which spent six months analyzing customer conversations to understand the actions agents take to process customer requests and apply them to Jeanie.
“Lizzie, our [LivePerson] conversation designer, helped us craft Jeanie’s tone, which was designed specifically to be empathetic and knowledgeable. We even formed a conversational design team to incorporate those concepts into every interaction Jeanie would facilitate going forward,” says Alex. “When we talk about Jeanie, we reference her like she’s one of our agents in the contact center because she truly was created to be just like them.”
A customer-centric approach to automation and banking virtual assistants
Even though the intention is to fully service as many customer questions as possible with Jeanie 2.0, Fifth Third’s customer experience is a thoughtful balance of virtual assistant automation and the human touch.
For example, one of the most common things customers try to do in Fifth Third’s mobile banking app is making payments — paying friends, paying utilities, and so on. “There’s a lot of rigor that goes into that and making sure payments are done accurately,” says Alex. “It’s one of our most complex servicing requests.”
“Should I send a payment through ACH or a wire transfer if I need it done quickly?” and “How do I send automatic payments from a different bank?” are just a few of the payment-related questions Jeanie has been refined to be able to answer. If more sensitive inquiries do come up — like transaction disputes — Jeanie is able to hand off those conversations to an agent.
“Jeanie’s the perfect solution to handle certain requests and reduce agent load,” says Alex. “There are still some questions that will end up with an agent just because of their complexity, but most of our conversation routes are now fully serviced by Jeanie.”
Don’t forget the agent experience
With a customer service background herself, Alex has a unique understanding of the challenges that agents at financial institutions face, and one of her priorities was to ensure Jeanie provided a good experience for not only Fifth Third’s customers, but also their agents.
By regularly sitting in on the contact center floor, she was able to observe just how much back-and-forth work agents had to do just to find information before servicing a customer.
Even with AI-powered technology and a virtual banking assistant like Jeanie 1.0, agents had to scroll up and read the entire conversation history to understand the personalized requests and what the customers needed. Often, they had to ask additional follow-up questions before they could start helping.
“One of the biggest changes we made with Jeanie 2.0 was using agent private message, which gives the agent a summary of what’s needed to help that customer,” says Alex.“Having all the context clues up front enables them to know exactly what’s wrong and how to solve it, which is important since they’re working with up to four customers at once.”
Fifth Third’s agents also typically had to manually search for and use a variety of content to perform different tasks when helping customers. For example, if a customer needs to enroll in a digital payment network, the agent would have to find the specific script telling them what information they needed to send the customer.
But the previous content and script library wasn’t holistic enough for agents’ needs — they ended up creating their own scripts to answer questions of a more complex range within Outlook or whichever platform was most convenient. This meant they had to constantly switch between different screens and applications to access that content while interacting with customers.
So, Alex turned to LivePerson’s predefined content library to streamline and increase efficiency in this process. “We went through the content they were using and consolidated 600 of the best ones for our customer segments and scenarios into our content library. Now, our agents have one less screen-switch to do when servicing customers.”
What’s next for Jeanie?
With Jeanie 2.0’s success so far, Alex is looking to keep the momentum going by scaling up their virtual banking assistant to provide a 24/7 digital channel for Fifth Third’s other customer groups beyond their standard consumers, such as small business banking and highly affluent clients.
They also plan to expand their data efforts to better understand how customers are using their messaging channels, enrich Jeanie’s capabilities, and empower agents to provide more personalized interactions.
“The sky’s the limit with Jeanie,” says Alex. “But at the end of the day, our agents and the people who staff the messaging channel are really the heroes for the customers.”
