Senior Data Scientist - Contact Centre AI

About the role

Manulife Asia is looking for a Senior Data Scientist to join its Contact Centre AI Squad, based in Singapore/Hong Kong. The role leads regional and business unit contact centre AI solution development, supporting insurance-related modelling and AI work. It covers speech and interaction analytics, customer intent and sentiment understanding, intelligent quality assurance, agent assist, conversational AI, demand forecasting, workforce optimization, next best action and responsible GenAI solutions.

Key responsibilities

• Deliver machine learning, generative AI and advanced analytics across the contact centre value chain, from demand forecasting and customer intent to agent assist, quality management, self-service and customer experience.
• Lead the design, development, deployment and continuous improvement of contact centre AI solutions across Asia markets, and track, evaluate and report AI project benefits, model performance, adoption and operational impact.
• Support the contact centre data strategy by improving data quality, optimizing internal interaction data assets, identifying external customer service data sources and strengthening data governance.
• Develop predictive, prescriptive and GenAI-enabled solutions for demand forecasting, intelligent routing, agent productivity, quality assurance, self-service containment, proactive risk management and better customer outcomes.
• Collaborate with global, regional and in-market teams to set modelling standards, reusable solution patterns, governance frameworks and responsible AI practices aligned with AI CoE standards.
• Maintain a regional model and AI solution repository, guide in-country analytics and AI teams, and enable data-driven routing, personalization and next best action recommendations.
• Build regional and BU-level result tracking, reporting and best practice capabilities, and develop annual contact centre AI business plans, roadmaps, priorities and targets.

Required profile

• 6+ years of experience in data science and machine learning, preferably in retail financial services; contact centre, customer service or customer experience analytics experience is a significant advantage.
• Strong communication and presentation skills, ability to lead initiatives from scratch, handle ambiguity and work independently as a team player.
• Able to manage stakeholders with conflicting priorities and deal with data availability and quality issues in certain markets.

Required skills

• Hands-on experience with multivariate analysis, modelling, segmentation and contact centre analytics, including speech, text, interaction, customer journey and operational performance analytics.
• Building and deploying AI/ML models using tools such as Python, SAS, R and SQL.
• Experience deploying analytics solutions including targeting, test and control development, response tracking and analysis.
• Big data and cloud solutions such as Azure, Hadoop, Hive and Spark are a plus.