A chatbot to answer questions from LHV’s clients on Facebook

19. June 2017

On the LHV Pank Facebook page message app, all questions from clients are now answered by the chatbot Uku.

Uku is an innovative virtual assistant, based on machine learning, who is capable of answering simple and frequently asked questions. For instance, the chatbot is well-versed in the locations of LHV’s automated teller machines or when interbank transactions are performed.

We brought the chatbot online to further increase the quality of our services. Now, LHV’s client support agents have more time to answer more complicated questions and go into greater depth with problems that need to be solved. We encourage everybody that has more complicated questions regarding our banking services to contact us directly by telephoning 6 800 400, sending an e-mail to info@lhv.ee or using the client chat channel. However, if the question is of a more general nature, and a quick online search fails to provide an answer, the client might want to give the Facebook message app a try, instead of our client support, where our virtual assistant Uku is quick to reply.

‘We invite all people interested in LHV services and using digital communication channels to ask Uku questions. In a sense, Uku is still an experiment and in terms of its substantive side it is still far from perfect – we need input from users, as the chatbot will continue to learn and become smarter’, says Andres Kitter, Head of LHV Retail Banking. ‘The more questions that are asked of the virtual assistant and the more feedback that is given, the more precise will be the answers given by the chatbot.’

LHV is the first bank in Estonia to trust online communication to a chatbot; it is also one of the more developed technologies in Estonia attempting to answer more complicated and open questions.

The chatbot was developed in cooperation with AlphaBlues. Indrek Vainu, the co-founder of AlphaBlues, said: news/2017/‘The LHV chatbot is an innovative client service solution where questions can be posed in a manner similar to chatting with a human. The solution uses different machine learning algorithms and technologies to provide the best possible answers to clients. We are happy to work together with LHV, receive feedback from clients and, in the long run, to provide Uku with greater knowledge, to make it even smarter.

Uku is available on Facebook or directly via the message app.

Chatbot is a client support solution based on machine learning. This means that the robot is developed with input from users and developers. Feedback is received from users regarding whether the answers were helpful, enabling the robot to be made more accurate. In the background, manual verification is also performed and only the developer can add content and new answers to the chatbot. The chatbot is a kind of a search engine that finds the correct answers to FAQ queries. A number of different chatbots are already in use around the world; however, in Estonia, they are still relatively uncommon.

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