Crédit Mutuel, one of France’s leading banks, has over 5,000 branches that receive more than 350,000 online inquiries a day — and volume is growing 23% a year. Maintaining the quality of client relationships, while dealing with an ever-rising stream of customers and client requests, meant reinventing the role of client advisor or losing their competitive edge.

After running a diagnosis of how client advisors were spending their time, Crédit Mutuel found that a significant part of their work involved answering simple and repetitive questions. With this in mind, the bank turned to IBM to find a solution that could speed up everyday processes and allow client advisors time to address more complicated and nuanced problems.

When Watson was introduced at Crédit Mutuel, employees began asking about the possibility of their jobs being replaced by AI. The bank needed to convince employees of Watson’s ability to empower them do their jobs better — not replace them. “The challenge was offering something that would be good enough for customer advisors to change their habits,” said one of Crédit Mutuel’s project managers.

Getting adoption at scale meant regularly reminding customer advisors to go through Watson, rather than rely on older systems they might be more comfortable with. As the system improved and became more user-friendly, its use increased. Watson began transforming how client advisors could get work done.

“Watson is my assistant. He’s a time-saver and lets me know my client better,” said one of Crédit Mutuel’s 20,000 customer advisors. “Watson is a job facilitator. It allows resources to be refocused on matters of added value,” said Reichert.

Crédit Mutuel has trained Watson to help its client advisors provide customers with quick and comprehensive information on an array of offerings, from car and housing insurance to a range of savings and investment products. “It’s impossible for our customer advisors to know all of our 200 products. So we provide them with tools to have the right information for the right client,” said Mathieu Dehestru, Head of Transformation, Marketing and Big Data at Crédit Mutuel insurance. “Watson gives more time to our client advisors, so they have more time for client relationships,” he said.

Thanks to its Watson-infused email analyzer and four virtual assistants, Crédit Mutuel is able to enrich interactions between client advisors and customers. Watson has made it possible to find the right answers 60% faster, and it can help deflect and address 50% of the 350,000 daily emails received by the bank’s client advisors.