BBVA Cuts Customer Inquiry Response Times with AI Assistants

A major Spanish bank has made significant strides in improving customer service by leveraging artificial intelligence. BBVA’s contact centers in Italy and Germany have seen a more than 15% reduction in average handling times for common customer inquiries, thanks to the implementation of generative AI assistants.

The two fully digital banks’ teams developed these specialized tools using BBVA Assistants, the Group’s corporate platform for creating and scaling generative AI. This platform enables employees to build customized assistants that can transform business processes by combining OpenAI models with proprietary orchestration architecture.

BBVA customer service agents in Italy and Germany previously spent considerable time consulting multiple internal documents and product manuals specific to each market when responding to nearly 100,000 customer inquiries per month via phone, email, or the bank’s messaging channel. This process often required searching through various sources to find relevant information for each case.

To address this challenge, BBVA’s Digital Banks teams identified an opportunity to create AI assistants that would bring together all necessary knowledge in a single place. Agents can now submit customer requests in natural language, and these AI copilots generate structured response proposals within seconds, which are then reviewed and adapted by the agents before being sent to customers.

The tool has been used daily by over 260 customer service agents across both countries without accessing sensitive data. It is designed primarily for answering frequently asked questions about products, services, and general procedures, such as increasing transfer limits or tracking card deliveries. However, when a response depends on specific circumstances, the agent still analyzes the case and consults internal systems to provide personalized support.

The AI assistants were developed using BBVA Assistants, which enables employees to create specialized tools that can streamline business processes. This platform combines OpenAI models with proprietary architecture for access control, knowledge management, and supervision mechanisms that ensure compliance with security and governance standards.

In June alone, customer service agents in both countries exchanged over 40,000 messages with their AI copilots while preparing responses to customer inquiries. This makes them among the most widely used assistants on BBVA Assistants, demonstrating how bringing generative AI capabilities closer to business teams can lead to tangible improvements in customer experience.

The development and implementation of these AI assistants were guided by BBVA’s AI Assistant Governance Framework, an internal governance model that establishes supervision and control measures for all AI assistants developed within the bank. This framework includes human oversight mechanisms, reviews of prompt quality and knowledge sources used, as well as impact assessments to mitigate risks associated with generative AI.

The framework ensures that these specialized tools are designed to alert agents about potential data usage issues and incorporates technical controls to prevent inappropriate or unsupported information from being generated. All outputs are reviewed before sharing them with customers, further ensuring the accuracy of responses.

Training has also been crucial in mitigating these risks. Customer service agents receive dedicated training sessions where they learn how to formulate prompts effectively, provide context, and make the most of the assistants’ capabilities. This training contributes to more accurate responses, improves user experience for agents, and accelerates adoption of the solution.

The success of this project is attributed to its bottom-up approach, with BBVA’s customer-facing teams identifying a challenge in their daily work and leveraging AI to turn that idea into a tangible impact on both business operations and customer satisfaction. According to Elena Alfaro, Head of Global AI Adoption at BBVA, ‘the need came directly from the teams who interact with our customers every day.’

The implementation of these generative AI assistants marks a significant improvement in customer service for BBVA’s two fully digital banks. By speeding up information retrieval and response preparation, these tools enable agents to dedicate more time to complex cases that require deeper analysis and personalized support.