Customer Service Automation
NatWest wanted to evolve its long-running digital assistant beyond basic FAQ handling so customers could receive more nuanced, personalized banking answers through digital channels without sacrificing trust, accuracy, or empathy in financially sensitive conversations.
Reported impact
NatWest used Cora+ to deliver more contextual digital service, lift satisfaction materially on some question types, and improve agent handoffs while serving a customer base that already relies heavily on digital banking.
NatWest and IBM upgraded the bank’s existing Cora assistant into Cora+, a multichannel customer-support platform that uses IBM watsonx Assistant on IBM Cloud and a retrieval-augmented generation architecture to answer banking questions directly in chat. Rather than simply linking customers to static content, the platform securely accesses information from multiple internal sources spanning products, services, and banking information, then generates more complete answers across the website, mobile app, and social channels. IBM Client Engineering partnered with NatWest’s business and technology teams to prove the approach first and then move it into production, while governance guardrails were added to keep responses transparent, accurate, and trustworthy. The same platform also summarizes conversations and surfaces customer context for bank agents, so the solution improves both digital self-service and assisted-service handoffs rather than treating them as separate systems.
Customer questions arrive through NatWest’s website, mobile app, or social channels, Cora+ retrieves relevant banking information from multiple sources, watsonx Assistant generates a direct response in chat, and the system can also summarize the interaction for human agents who need to continue the conversation.
“Cora+ also improves the bank agent experience by summarising conversations and providing clear insights into customer needs and previous interactions.”
“Powered by IBM watsonx Assistant and built on IBM Cloud, Cora+ delivers sophisticated, human-like interactions to customers across NatWest’s website, mobile app and social media platforms.”
“this support channel successfully addressed nearly 11 million customer inquiries”
“up to 150% improvement in satisfaction with some of the questions we’re answering.”
“using retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG) technology, Cora+ can take the natural language questions posed by users and proactively answer them within the chat”
Review how this reference was scored and trace each normalized claim back to its documented source.
Scoring methodology
Customer Reference Value measures usefulness as a customer reference. Evidence Confidence measures the quality and traceability of available evidence, not independent verification.
Traceability
Field coverage shows which facts each source supports. Dates are shown only when documented by the source.
Related
IBM Sample Aug 11, 2026 Inter Inter needed to evolve a large, API-heavy conversational banking environment into a more scalable AI operating model without breaking the integrations, governance controls, and continuity behind critical customer… 45M customers served IBM Cloud · IBM watsonx Orchestrate IBM Sample Aug 10, 2026 Farmers State Bank Farmers State Bank needed to connect fragmented website, phone, and branch interactions because customers expected digital-first convenience while the bank still needed to preserve the personal relationships central to… IBM watsonx Orchestrate · Incede.ai · Penny IBM Sample Aug 25, 2025 Claims Connection Group Claims Connection Group needed to replace slow, fragmented and manual property-insurance claims handling so it could respond faster during disaster-driven spikes, interpret policy language more consistently, and reduce… 25-35% reduction in operational costs IBM Business Automation Workflow · IBM Robotic Process Automation · IBM watsonx 