Using Generative AI to improve our award-winning customer experience

Learn how Discover is using generative AI to create a better customer experience by empowering our call center agents.

Getting the answers you need when you need them is critical when it comes to accessing your finances and financial information. Discover^® Financial Services has nearly 10,000 contact center agents who answer customer calls and messages, ranging from simple questions related to balances and payments, to difficult inquiries about various financial concepts, policies, and procedures.

To ensure you're getting the right answers—faster—Discover is piloting a program that uses generative AI tools to understand customer intent and resolve their queries faster.

Moving from searching and scrolling to instant, correct answers

When a customer asks a question, the service agent’s goal is to provide the correct information in the quickest amount of time possible. Previously, an agent would search an internal database, parsing through search results based on keywords, much how you search through any internet search tool. Because finance can be complex with many acronyms, jargon, and policies—finding the most relevant documents could be difficult. The time spent scrolling was time our customers spent waiting.

Enter the power of Generative AI.

At Discover, we take a measured, thoughtful approach to our use of GenAI. We are partnering with leaders in the AI space like Google to develop responsible, secure, ethical, and bias-free ways to use this technology to provide direct answers to our agents so they spend less time searching and more time helping our customers.

As early adopters of generative AI, Discover is taking a test-and-learn approach with less sensitive information like policies and procedures. We are training foundational models using our own policies, procedures, acronyms, and jargon so that the models can better understand intent and give agents the right answers, sooner. Using an approach that’s based on natural language processing is driving better results. We’re not talking about incremental improvements, either. With GenAI, we can now go directly from question to answer, giving our customers exactly what they're looking for.

Using AI in service of our agents, not in place of

With any new technology, there is a bit of hype that comes with it. It’s safe to say, we are at the peak of the AI hype curve. Now we’re bringing it back to reality by implementing GenAI in a way that actually drives value for customers, for businesses, for our employees.

The key theme to this work is simple we want to build stronger, lifetime customer relationships, and we focus on that every day. Our goal is to continue to automate to improve the experience of our employees and our customers, and GenAI is yet another tool that lets us push the boundary of what is possible, freeing up more time for both agents and customers to focus on creating brighter financial futures.