Watson to assist 20,000 customer advisors across France, enhancing the quality of service for 12 million customers

PARIS and STRASBOURG, France, April 20, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Crédit Mutuel and IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today that following a successful pilot, the use of Watson technologies is extended to 20,000 employees across 5,000 branches to continue to strengthen customer relationships. This marks the first commercial use of Watson by a financial institution in France to assist its professionals. The bank's customer advisors have been using Watson services in French for the past year, integrated in their business applications, as Crédit Mutuel and IBM have partnered to train and improve Watson's French language capabilities.

By mid-June, Watson-based solutions will be deployed to client advisors across the 15 federations of Crédit Mutuel throughout France:  

• The Email Analyzer will help the advisors of these branches to manage the more than 350,000 customer e-mails they receive each day. The solution allows the Bank to identify the most frequent requests, determine the level of request urgency and help its client advisors execute faster or delegate associated tasks, allowing them to accelerate and enhance responses provided to their customers.
• Two Virtual Assistant applications will use Watson technology to help the advisors rapidly provide customers with information on a comprehensive set of offerings, starting with complex domains such as car and housing insurances, and the whole range of savings and investments products.

After one year of intensive training with the business experts of the bank, and after a successful pilot with 150 client advisors in 20 branches, both solutions were strongly endorsed by the pilot's users. Working with Watson-based solutions trained with internal business knowledge has helped them free up time; improve the speed, relevance and accuracy of responses to queries; and ultimately reinforce relationships with their customers, providing more personalized attention. According to an internal survey of participants, 94 percent of the respondents would recommend the Virtual Assistant to colleagues and 87 percent would recommend the Email Analyzer. The pilot also demonstrated that client advisors were able to find the right answers to most of their customer questions more than 60 percent faster using the Watson-based Virtual Assistant.

"As a mutual bank with a strong local presence all over the country, we continue to invest in our branches to help advisors deliver more personal relationships with our clients, whether face to face, by phone, or digital. In this context, Watson is a perfect working partner to assist our professionals, augment their service quality and help them bring more value to clients," said Nicolas Thery, chairman at Crédit Mutuel. "We are evolving our banking business to deliver a growing number of diversified and valuable services to clients, and we recognize how important it is for our professionals to be central to our client relationships."

"Crédit Mutuel's work with Watson is a powerful example of how professionals are working with cognitive technologies to improve their performance and enhance how they interact with customers," said David Kenny, senior vice president, IBM Watson & Cloud Platform. "Crédit Mutuel is focused on making their customer relationships more personal and valuable, and we are proud to work with them as they demonstrate how Watson is helping their employees more quickly provide the right answers to customer questions."

Crédit Mutuel will extend the use of Watson technologies to additional use cases later this year, for health, personal risk insurance, car credit insurance, and bank credit services.

About Crédit Mutuel

A leading European bank acknowledged for its financial strength and top-quality ratios, Crédit Mutuel is deeply attached to its core retail banking business and mutualist values. It has gradually diversified over time, first as a pioneer in bancinsurance and then in other fields such as telephony, remote surveillance and, more recently, contactless payments. Its technological expertise, which has constantly been a focal point of its development strategy, has enabled it to become one of Europe leading payments solutions providers. For more information, visit: www.creditmutuel.fr

On this specific project, 15 of the 18 federations of the Crédit Mutuel work together. They are as follows:

Crédit Mutuel d'Anjou, Crédit Mutuel Antilles-Guyane, Crédit Mutuel du Centre, Crédit Mutuel Centre Est Europe, Crédit Mutuel Dauphiné-Vivarais, Crédit Mutuel Ile-de-France, Crédit Mutuel Loire-Atlantique et Centre-Ouest, Crédit Mutuel Maine-Anjou Basse-Normandie, Crédit Mutuel Méditerranéen, Crédit Mutuel Midi-Atlantique, Crédit Mutuel Nord Europe, Crédit Mutuel de Normandie, Crédit Mutuel Océan, Crédit Mutuel Savoie-Mont Blanc et Crédit Mutuel du Sud-Est.

About IBM Watson: Pioneering a New Era of Computing

Watson represents a new era in computing called cognitive computing, where systems understand the world in a way more similar to humans: through senses, learning, and experience. Watson continuously learns from previous interactions, gaining in value and knowledge over time. With the help of Watson, organizations are harnessing the power of cognitive computing to transform industries, help professionals do their jobs better, and solve important challenges.

As part of IBM's strategy to accelerate the growth of cognitive computing, Watson is open to the world, allowing a growing community of developers, students, entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts to easily tap into the most advanced and diverse cognitive computing platform available today. Watson solutions are being built, used and deployed in more than 45 countries and across 20 different industries.

For more information on IBM Watson, visit: ibm.com/Watson. Join the conversation at #ibmwatson.

Media Contact: Samantha Mayowa, 401-419-9569, sbmayowa@us.ibm.com

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SOURCE IBM