Zenith Bank: Reduced Costs and Increased Reach with Whatsapp Business Platform

Challenge

Zenith Bank has an established reputation as a leader in the digital space, with several firsts in the deployment of innovative products, solutions and an assortment of alternative channels that ensure convenience, speed and safety of transactions.

The expansion resulting from their continuous innovation resulted in an increased number of calls coming into the bank’s contact centre. Many of these calls were for simple queries, such as account balance inquiries or opening a bank account which fall into the realm of self-service. Agents were struggling to handle these queries efficiently – resulting in long wait times and dropped calls.

To address this challenge, Zenith bank wanted to introduce a new, secure communication channel for customers. They also wanted to automate its processes for simple queries so customers could receive quick answers to frequently asked questions – removing the pressure on call center agents.

In addition to the call center, the bank utilizes the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) platform to engage with customers. While these queries are often basic and yield no income for the bank, the cost of a USSD session is relatively high and would be borne by the bank. As a result, there was also a need to find ways to reduce these costs.

Solution

Today, consumers want to engage with brands over the channel of their choice. For Zenith Bank, that meant implementing WhatsApp as a primary customer communication channel.

Since the bank was already using our SMS service alongside Interactive Voice Response (IVR), email, and a mobile app, they decided to boost their omnichannel communication by implementing the WhatsApp Business Platform with Infobip as their solution provider.

Since implementing WhatsApp as a new channel, Zenith Bank was able to automate its processes by setting up a chatbot which they call ZiVA.

ZiVA enables customers to complete financial transactions and receive real-time support 24/7. Now, Zenith Bank customers can contact ZiVA to:

Results

Introducing a WhatsApp chatbot helped Zenith Bank reduce costs by moving customer communication away from it’s Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) platform and its call center to a more economical solution.

Now, customers use ZiVA to receive timely support, and agents have more time to focus on complex queries.

The bank was also able to increase its reach since WhatsApp is the world’s most popular chat app – with over 2 billion users.

Zenith bank looks forward to growing its business and providing efficient, real-time support to customers when they need it most.