Smart Pension has brought SAVA (Smart Avatar Virtual Assistant) on board its customer service team to provide 24/7, 365-day-a-year support to its nearly one million members.
SAVA can operate in 22 languages and is totally accessible, allowing users to ask questions by speaking or typing them and hearing or reading responses. As part of Smart’s objective to ‘change retirement, savings, and financial wellbeing, across all generations, around the world,’ the technology is designed to make information about pensions and retirement available to everyone, including individuals who have difficulties reading or writing.
Smart developed the technology in partnership with Trulience, a company that specialises in “real likeness science,” and it is the result of years of effort by Trulience’s co-founders, Marek Zwiefka-Sibley and Ben Weekes.
Smart Pension director of operations Sue Whittington says: “We’re delighted to have SAVA on board as part of our award-winning customer service team. As SAVA provides assistance to our nearly one million members who have their queries quickly answered, it reduces wait times for customers whose questions require technical assistance. All of this means our UK team can put even more time and investment into helping employers and savers with their pension needs.”
Smart UK CEO Jamie Fiveash says: “Developing state-of-the-art technology to put our customers at the heart of the user experience is key. By automating the simple stuff, our valued colleagues can focus on helping our clients with the hard stuff that an interactive avatar cannot. For other businesses, the applications of Trulience’s technology are endless; just in finance, Trulience could provide engaging and clear advice journeys for those who cannot afford to pay for a human adviser – finally real robo advice is on the horizon.
“Trulience is a key part of us improving our customer experience now, and will be with us long into the future. We are the first fintech firm to offer this service to our members, and it will be a continuously evolving part of our next generation global savings technology platform going forward.”