CIB is Egypt’s leading private-sector bank. It is an award-winning institution dedicated to creating out- standing stakeholder value and providing superior customer service solutions to a broad range of clients. The Bank furnishes clients with innovative solutions that satisfy their banking needs and facilitate their financial lives. Its dynamic business model and commitment to integrating superior technology into its products and services have enabled it to maintain its market leadership and offer its staff an engaging work environment while generating mounting value.

The Bank serves an expansive network of retail customers, high-net-worth (HNW) individuals, enterprises, and institutions that drive the Egyptian economy. With a well-established network of 207 branches and banking units and a workforce comprising 6,900 employees, CIB provides tailored, client-centric services to clients in the corporate, commercial, retail, wealth, and small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) spheres, while working to deliver the most streamlined, efficient banking service offering in the Egyptian market.

Enjoying such an expansive and diversified network of customers has certainly imposed a number of challenges on CIB to sustain its prominent customer service levels. The bank was opting for an easy-to-use tool that provides comprehensive and instant, yet credible, answers to its customers. The main perspective was offering a personalized experience of fast-paced, around-the-clock communication tool. Furthermore, the bank management had a strategic perspective in mind, which is offloading, and cost-saving of call center and marketing team while maintaining confidentiality considerations of its customers. In a nutshell, this tool should be able to satisfy the following requirements:

1. Perform one-to-one conversations with customers and guide them through the bank’s services portfolio in a highly simplified comprehensible flow.
2. Supports both English and colloquial Arabic.
3. Operate on both Facebook Messenger and CIB’s public website, with an embedded capacity of introducing a new version over WhatsApp that will include a live agent for non-resolved
4. Provide geographical guidance in finding the nearest ATM or branch and sharing its location over the supported platforms.
5. Provide menu-based experience and free text with an advanced auto-complete feature
6. Recommend the most convenient bank product to customers based on their answers to a number of automatically generated questions, and furnishing necessary information about the product in subject.
7. Being equipped with FAQs with a huge variety of small talks for non-banking talks (ex. greetings, general conversations..etc).
8. Provide digital lead generation by capturing customer behavior and questions to be able to generate digital leads and provide specific promotions based on customer interest.
9. Distinguish retail and corporate customers and provide answers based on this differentiation, coupled with a matching avatar for each case.

Oracle, WIND-IS, and A Noteworthy Implementation 

A furious competition took place at this stage among different technology options that best realize the CIB targets and satisfy its requirements and evaluate leading-edge providers who can implement that solution in a modular timeframe. WIND-IS stood out among a huge queue of high-level competitors and was awarded the implementation project.

WIND-IS was able to finalize the implementation phase in only six months. The solution provided used advanced artificial intelligence (Oracle Digital Assistant) to assist customers and gather key data. In 2019, CIB became the first bank in Egypt to introduce an AI chatbot called Zaki, and this was the first version equipped with general inquiries and some products announcements. Later, CIB in collaboration with WIND-IS has invested intensively in the implemented solution to fulfill customer and non-customer needs.

Zaki is considered an important milestone in the digital transformation journey of CIB; it does not only deliver customer-centric solutions and innovative touch points, but it also serves as a key channel for data gathering.

Zaki supports users using two main approaches; the first is offering a clear, detailed, and comprehensive demonstration of banking products and services. This demonstration is coupled with the necessary steps to subscribe or request a given product/service. The second approach is the guided flow; it simply asks the user a few questions and employs the answers to recommend the most suitable product to the users based on these answers.