BSI News. Our new format for new features

With our team of IT professionals, we can do in less than a day what a single person would take a whole year to do. We use this combination of expertise to continuously improve, expand, and perfect the BSI Customer Suite. Therefore, with each release, a multitude of new functions and features are added to our CRM universe. We want to present some of them to you in this forum today and in the future – as information worth reading, valuable tips for your everyday work, or simply as good news from BSI.

• Applying targeted communication instead of the watering can principle: With the “Participate” feature, campaigns in the BSI Customer Suite can first be developed centrally and then used individually in a decentralized manner.
• Smart companion: The BSI Customer Suite’s BSI companion is like a trusted co-worker of yours who likes to take care of the translating, summarizing, and enhancing of texts for you.
• Sorry, ChatGPT: The reasons why we count on open-source LLMs at BSI. And their advantages for data security, quality, and budget.

The “Participate” feature individualizes campaign management

The BSI Customer Suite’s “Participate” feature provides powerful added value. This is particularly true for customers in the banking and insurance industry, but also for companies in other industries whose organizations have decentralized offices such as branches or agencies. That’s because “Participate” allows marketing departments to centrally plan campaigns in the form of stories in the BSI Customer Suite and then make them available to different departments or branch offices for their individual use.

Create your own campaign with just a few clicks

Users in decentralized locations can go to the “Participate” folder in their cockpit to find informational tiles for all planned and ongoing campaigns and can use the preview function to find out about each campaign’s objectives, content, and process.

When selecting a campaign, users can individualize various attributes, depending on the configuration, and then choose participants from their databases and allocate them to their campaign. In the next step, they can individually adjust the allocation by participant again, therefore configuring an exact fit.

When it comes to central planning in marketing, the “Participate” feature offers, in addition to the parameters for the campaign description, other useful setting options for launching the campaigns in the Participate” folder of users in decentralized locations: Information on visibility and campaign length shows where a campaign is placed in the strategic annual planning. Plus, with the choice between one-time and ongoing execution, users can launch individual, event-dependent campaigns, such as birthday messages in the form of personal e-mails that are automatically sent out at the right time throughout the year.

An outstanding advantage of the “Participate” feature is its exceptional user-friendliness: Users in decentralized locations can go directly to the campaign overview from their homepage, the BSI Cockpit, and their new campaign is just a few clicks away. This feature turns central marketing departments into internal providers of communication solutions that can be utilized at decentralized locations very precisely and with little effort.

BSI's BSI Companion is a digital co-worker you can count on

With its Artificial Intelligence, the BSI Companion is a smart assistant that helps users work with text in the BSI Customer Suite. Whether it's a matter of translating texts, summarizing customer inquiries, or drafting a possible response using generative AI, the BSI Companion is ready for a variety of tasks. And, it accomplishes this as a fully integrated and legally compliant function of the BSI Customer Suite with just a few clicks.

Customer service with the BSI Companion is highly efficient and of the highest quality

Using the example of a customer request to a company's service center helps explain very clearly the enormous potential the BSI Companion application holds –especially when your digital co-worker’s Artificial Intelligence is automated further:

As soon as a customer’s e-mail lands in your inbox, the BSI Companion recognizes what it is about: An inquiry about the shipping date of a product? A damage report? A complaint? Where this used to require time and human comprehension of text in the past, BSI Companion provides a time-saving summary in the desired language today.

And that's not all. While you answer the e-mail you received, your BSI Companion is also there as your valuable assistant and makes suggestions for improvement at the touch of a button, which you can check and edit again before sending your message. As a result, customer service employees remain flexible and, at the same time, can respond faster to customer inquiries.

In a nutshell: The BSI Companion facilitates highly efficient customer service with excellent quality. At the same time, it is fully legally compliant due to its complete integration into the BSI Customer Suite. And that's what matters because, after all, your AI colleague works with sensitive company data.

Employees as the gatekeepers of Artificial Intelligence

The principle of “human gatekeeping” continues to apply to today's work processes supported by Artificial Intelligence: It continues to be people who ultimately decide what to do and who control, evaluate, and approve AI-generated results as human gatekeepers.

The interaction of Artificial Intelligence with the BSI Customer Suite’s automation options follows this principle from two perspectives: Our AI-based processes are highly configurable and are designed very openly to make certain that future innovative developments will not be slowed down by a technical bottleneck. At the same time, our software architecture ensures the gradual introduction of AI and automation into our day-to-day work – geared toward the current needs of our customers.

BSI Artificial Intelligence. Established in 2018

What everyone has been talking about since the introduction of ChatGPT has been part of BSI’s day-to-day business for more than half a decade: We have been using Artificial Intelligence in the BSI Customer Suite since 2018, and, along with that, language models (Large Language Models, LLMs) for customer relationship management. Right from the start, we decided on open-source LLMs, which have enjoyed major developments by now and can absolutely compete with ChatGPT’s performance today or even surpass it. Apart from this, there are critical strategic advantages that favor the use of open-source LLM:

Your company data stays where it belongs: in a safe place

Für BSI geniesst der Schutz unserer Kundendaten höchste Priorität. Und deshalb haben wir Open Source LLM direkt in die BSI Customer Suite integriert. Somit verlassen Kundendaten zu keinem Zeitpunkt den Safe Space unserer Server und gelangen nicht in die USA oder andere Länder mit weniger strengen Datenschutzregeln.

Open Source bedeutet Freiheit und Flexibilität

As an innovative software company, we want to be able to make decisions with freedom and flexibility when it comes to new technology developments or providers of interest and adopt the most highly performing model for our customers. BSI's platform approach makes it easy for us to connect LLMs to the BSI Customer Suite and integrate them into any module. As with ChatGPT, our Artificial Intelligence is already pretrained and can be used instantly by companies using the BSI Customer Suite. If needed, the models can be retrained for individual applications – which is another advantage of open-source LLM.

Full control and transparency as the basis for high ethical standards

And this is one of the most important benefits of open source: Unlike proprietary solutions like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, our LLMs have an open architecture and transparent training data. This shows what the decisions Artificial Intelligence makes are based on, which makes it easier to investigate ethical issues such as bias, toxic language, or social stereotypes in the data and, if necessary, take appropriate and targeted actions.

In addition, open-source LLMs ensure that BSI’s high ethical standards are met. These standards are firmly embedded in BSI’s Code of Conduct, where BSI commits itself, among other things, to digital ethics considerations in the development and handling of AI systems. Moreover, the Swiss association Swiss Insights, with its “DataFairness” label, identifies BSI as a company that deals fairly with data processes and actively engages with digital ethics.

Last but not least: the question of cost

With our open-source platform model, we are independent of commercial providers such as OpenAI with its ChatGPT. This eliminates the risk of being dependent on a particular model and puts an end to high switching costs and providers’ uncontrollable price developments.