1            Terms of Reference

INTRODUCTION

FINCA Uganda is currently deploying various digital channels to enhance its customers’ experience. To date, we integrated and deployed a Mobile Banking solution delivered through Android App and USSD. Given the rise of Social media and AI-driven technological solutions, FINCA Uganda is willing to integrate within its technical environment (1) Social media Banking delivered through WhatsApp and/ or Facebook, and (2) Chatbot capabilities driving a regular engagement with its customers ranging from simple guides to support transactions all the way to action-oriented customer dialogue to increase awareness, registration, activity of its products.

FINCA Uganda is seeking services of capable vendors who can provide a Chatbot Solution, delivered through Social Media (i.e., WhatsApp, Facebook channels to be delivered as part of the scope of this TOR), as well as through the existing Mobile Banking channels (i.e., USSD and App). FINCA is considering leveraging the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to build a completely differentiated experience for its customers by combing knowledge across all relevant segments and providing better insights about company’s products through it. To this effect, FINCA Uganda is currently developing a savings-oriented customer engagement curriculum that is expected to be taken on within the Chatbot technology proposed. This will give rise to a new level of conversational experience where results will be delivered instantly through real-time conversations, thus facilitating better decision making.

Our objective is on solving the customer queries and providing products information by creating a one stop platform for all customer needs related to our products information, troubleshooting, and guidance on various on-boarding processes of digital products.

We solicit a technological partner who has developed a comprehensive Chatbot application in the past and has an off-the-shelf AI based product with state of art features fulfilling our requirements.

The product should be such that it can quickly be enhanced/ modified, deployed and integrated with our corporate website, digital channels like customer portal and Mobile & Tablet applications.

  1. Bidders are required to submit their proposal that presents the bidder’s qualifications, understanding of work to be performed, and commercials. The Bidders are advised to submit their cost competitive proposal that should illustrate their technical competence pertain to the given Scope of work.

REQUIREMENTS

  1. Social media Banking

The solution shall include Social Media (i.e. WhatsApp banking, Facebook banking) channels, to be connected into our existing Mobile Banking solution for delivery of financial transactions.

The Chatbot solution proposed shall be integrated with these channels.

2. Chatbot

An effective Chatbot solution should ideally cover below mentioned key elements:

  • Integrated Platform:

The solution shall be integrated to different platforms such as company’s current channels (i.e., mobile banking, internet banking, company’s website and social media pages, etc.) via APIs.

The bot should be able to support voice in English and regional languages. The bot platform should also support voice-based navigation in English to relevant content on web channels.

  • Key Use Cases for the Chatbot:

The Chatbot shall address customer queries/ complaints pertaining to but not limited to:

– Policy information

– Servicing request/ complaint related (login and status update both)

– New product related information. Online assisted sales bots can educate customers on how loan process works, compare products and select the best one for them.

The Chatbot shall assist users with the following:

– ‘How to’ series for products

– Product FAQs (i.e., help customer take up a loan, make online and bill payments, taking service request, address customer’s queries, obtain documents from the customer).

– User On-boarding to help and guide non-users to get on-boarded for different products

– Push offers and other promotional activities on different products to increase frequency of use.

The Chatbot shall increase engagement of users through the following:

– Customer Feedback

– Push Notifications platform integrated user segmentation

– News and Announcements-Subscription Messaging.

  • Chatbot Expected Features:
    1. Natural Language Processing (NLP): Use knowledge of sentence structure, idioms, and machine-learned pattern recognition to match the customer’s intent from unstructured sentences, grammatical errors, spelling mistakes and free text.
    2. Domain Specific Entity: Be able to perform the task of recognizing and classifying single and multi-word expression within chat instance that may refer to the name of the service or a specific entity like geographical areas, branches, etc.
    3. Machine Learning: The Chatbot enriches its algorithms through supervised and unsupervised learning. The machine itself shall be able to assign an inferred function to the data through careful analysis and extrapolation of patterns from raw data.
    4. Sentiment: The Chatbot should be able to detect the emotional polarity of the subject the human is talking about. It should be able to tell from the way the text or speech pattern is presented whether the human is angry, sad or happy. Based on the previous interactive data with the user, the Chatbot should be able to personalize with the emotional understanding and predictive analysis of the customer. The Chat bot should request for user feedback.
    5. Conversational Bot: The Chatbot should be capable of having an end-to-end conversation with the users. Menu based guided buttons should be there but the bots should not be restricting the conversation using a certain template or pattern. Inbuilt context handling capabilities should be thereby allowing the user to swiftly switch between the entities.
    6. Direct Message (DM) and Notifications: For Social Media, the chatbot to be activated through Direct Message (DM) on the company’s Facebook page, Twitter handle and other platforms. For Websites, the customer to be provided to select the chatbot from the page directly. The Mobile Banking App will send Chatbot-powered Notifications to the customer’s smartphone.
    7. Seamless Transfer to Operator: Chatbot platform should provide for a live agent dashboard and rule based re-directing of chat to a relevant live agent based on customer or conversation type. If agent is not available, the chatbot should be capable of raising a service ticket and tracking the same.
    8. Rich Media Templates handling: The Chatbot must be able to provide response using rich media templates. The solution must have validation framework.
    9. Real-time Interactive Dashboards: The Chatbot solution should provide different levels of filters criteria for generation of reports and dashboards based on the interactive queries, channels and products. The solution should be capable of handling all questions and access to all the conversations based on search text in reports. Solution should provide the real-time dashboard to help in generating industry-specific actionable insights for brand management, reputation management, customer satisfaction assessment, and so forth. Solution should be capable of providing reports in different formats such as word, excel, CSV, instantaneously.
  • Chatbot Implementation and Ongoing Considerations:
    1. The Bidder shall conduct Technical Presentation, Demonstration and Proof of Concept (POC) for qualifying the technical requirements specified by FINCA. Any expenses incurred as part of the Presentation, Demonstration and Proof of Concept (POC) shall be incurred by the bidder. POC will be integral part of Technical Evaluation.
    2. Provide a dedicated Project Manager during and post deployment and should have a 24 x 7 x 365 monitoring, technical and functional support team with skilled man power for support, monitoring and operations.
    3. Provide tools and utilities for the Chatbot and implement the same in production, development and test environments. Provide documentation and user manual for the product, processes, tools and utilities.
    4. The solution should be designed with redundancy in mind to ensure nil impact by the failure of one or more components/servers or software in the production environment.
    5. The Bidder will be responsible for creating and managing environments for Integration testing and UAT (User Acceptance Testing). Aforementioned will entail setting up of two environments namely a Staging Environment and a Live Production Environment alongside establishing DR environment. Enable suitable information security/cyber security and secure configuration in respect of the components, and utilities in the system.
    6. In case of cloud deployment, it is expected that the vendor provides support and monitoring of the provisioning: this shall be clearly detailed in the proposal.
    7. The Solution should focus on operational efficiency, quality and cost efficiency with continuous improvement by learning from regular sessions.-The SME (Subject Matter Expert) shall share the information/ FAQ and the solution shall convert the information ready for ChatBot conversation. The Bidder needs to suggest on the capacity planning basis the estimated volumes and projected future growth.
    8. The vendor will ensure troubleshooting and enhancements in the services during the contract period. All services for implementation, smooth operation and maintenance of all the components of Chat Bot solution developed/to be developed will be part of the Project. The vendor will have to include version upgrade and enhancements in services on account of industry dynamics as a part of the contract during the contract period.
    9. Source code for the interface/Workflow/reporting etc. will be owned by the company and should be a part of the deliverables. No proprietary framework/code to be used. Source code of the customized version should be the property of the company and it should be deposited to the company. The Solution should be secured and scalable for enhanced add-on services as per industry standard.
    10. The service provider will not disclose or use any information and data generated during Chat bot sessions such as user details, queries, responses, statistical data, and so forth, with any third party.
    11. The Bid should explicitly state the scope for the Chatbot solution along with the itemized estimated cost for the same.
    12. Information security, is to be of prime importance in the proposal. Security strategy of data at rest/transit to be explained. In case of cloud security aspects to be covered and should include cloud components for the same e.g. IP masking/Intrusion detection software/DDOS components etc. to be suggested and an estimate for the same to be provided in the bid. Successful Bidder upon selection will provide an undertaking to comply with the provisions of the Information Security Policy of the Company. Confidentiality of our customers’ information should be maintained even after the contract expires or gets terminated.

Access the Declaration of conflict of interest and Due Diligence Questionnaire below.

Declaration of Conflict of Interest

FINCA Uganda – Due Diligence Questionnaire