The next time you enter the T Nagar branch of City Union Bank in Chennai, you will be greeted by CUB-Lakshmi, who will be polite and patiently answer your numerous questions either about the interest rates offered by the bank or regarding your transactions.

Lakshmi is a robot being introduced on a pilot basis as part of the bank’s efforts to improve customer service.

Lakshmi, developed and powered by a French company, will speak and answer in English now. Going forward, she will be ‘trained’ to speak in other languages, such as Tamil and Malayalam.

“There are about 120 questions a bank customer could ask. If you have an intelligent robot that can answer all those questions, about 95 per cent of the requirements of the customer will be taken care of. CUB-Lakshmi is our first robot and it will answer general information about the bank, product details and account information,” N Kamakodi, CEO of CUB, said here after demonstrating the robot’s work.

The bank is working to integrate the robot with its CBS in order to enable transactions also to be part of its customisation works. CUB will wait and evaluate the responses to the robot and then decide on deploying it in more branches.

He is optimistic that Lakshmi would be accepted by customers. “In our bank, 83 per cent of transactions happen through alternate channels. The expectation is that in the next 10 years, about a fourth of bank counters will be handled by robots,” he added.

Its costs ₹7-8 lakh to deploy a robot and if it proves successful, the bank expects to install 25-30 robots across branches before the end of this fiscal.

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