ML and AI based budget bot by Orient Finance

After going through some of the Micro Moments of a potential finance buyer, Orient Finance together with team ‘enfection’ recently worked on a creative approach to engage with them.

They used the annual budget announcement as a key moment and studied past budget related data to further understand the user behaviour. Typically what would happen post budget is that social media would be rife with questions and various concessions pertaining to the budget. Rather than sticking to the mould and creating a video with some budget highlights, they created the world’s first Facebook based ‘budget-bot’ as a platform to answer queries related to the annual budget proposals. 

The budget-bot was placed and was accessible through Facebook, (a common platform used by 5.8m Sri Lankans) in order to capitalise on the social chatter. And this was the first time a finance company created an Ai based platform in order to provide answers for any questions related to the budget. 

The budget-bot was linked to the Orient Finance Facebook page and by visiting the page, users were able to start a conversation with the bot.

The budget-bot was created in three phases. At the initial development stage, the bot was programmed with a structured breakdown of the broad areas of the annual budget. The usual topics that are discussed during the budget were fed to the bot at development stage.

The second phase was the ‘bot training phase’. This was the stage where the bot was fed with information that were discussed and proposed at the budget recital. New information was fed to ensure that the questions asked were answered in real time successfully.

The third phase was where the bot was optimised to provide solutions according to the different variations an individual could ask a single question. After optimisation, the bot was thereafter intelligent enough to provide answers to different variations of a single question.

“This was relatively a new concept for Sri Lankans. We had to spend as much effort promoting the concept amongst Sri Lankans as we did developing the bot. Objective was to get the public comfortable with interacting with Bots and Artificial Intelligence,” said Nilantha Jayanetti, Senior Assistant General Manager at Orient Finance. According to Nilantha, this was an exciting way to engage with their clients whilst enhancing their customer experience when providing unique solutions for their budget related questions.

“Sri Lankans tend to have a good sense of humour; they will test out the Bot by asking different variations of a question and sometime amusing questions or question unrelated to the topic at hand. We try to keep it light in terms of how the Bot should responds but it is challenging to program the Bot to be responsive to such a broad set of questions,” says Shezri Junaid from  Enfection, the team behind developing  Sri Lanka’s first ever budget bot. One thing is for sure,  The Bot provides a unique opportunity for companies to engage with their customers. Further opportunities to improve efficiency, cost savings and flow of information are limitless with the Bot concept.

After carrying out its job successfully, the budget-bot by Orient Finance said goodbye but not for the last time. As Sri Lanka slowly but surely enters the digital era, we are bound to meet more Bots in our daily routine.