Artificial Intelligence is poised to create an enormous impact across all industries – banking, retail, transportation, etc. AI powered voicebots and chat bots are already making noticeable impacts to the financial services industry. Top 3 2018 Predictions for Artificial Intelligence in Banking describes how AI is going to play a huge role in customer experience in banking.
What is a chatbot and voicebot?
Chatbots and voicebots are AI powered software which can act as digital assistants that interact with customers through text and/or voice. Chatbots are often much better than the usual chat software as chatbots can respond to customers using data and logic. An AI powered digital assistant can also help customers to perform some basic tasks such as transactions, account related inquiries and more.
In this blogpost let’s discuss about the 3 customer experience related benefits realized by banks using voicebots and chatbots.
1. Enhanced Customer Experience
Chatbots are powerful when it comes to having conversation with customers. It bypasses the need to dial customer service and the agony of waiting in queue by quickly engaging multiple customers simultaneously. Chatbots that use Natural Language Processing (NLP) are capable of understanding customer’s queries and responding to them with precise answers. This improves the efficiency of the customer service team by taking care of repetitive requests. In addition to increasing efficiency, it can also save on support costs for the bank.
2. Personalized Recommendations
Chatbots can make accurate and useful recommendations to customers in real time by analyzing their past or historical data. AI algorithms can go analyze tons of customer data swiftly and profile the customers to provide personalized offers. Erica, a chatbot, from Bank of America is one such example of a chatbot that can make personalized recommendations for customers. Erica is available 24/7 for customers and leverages predicative analytics and cognitive messaging to send smart recommendations.
3. Consistent Service
With chatbots acting as a personal digital assistant for customers a bank can not only maintain consistency in service for all its customers, irrespective of the customer’s gender and account, but ensure equal treatment. This is often missing in human customer service interactions as the quality of service provided by the agents differ from one agent to another. The quality of service from a tired customer service executive won’t be top notch but an AI powered chatbot never gets tired and provides consistent service for all the customers.
Conclusion
Customer experience or rather convenience of banking is a key factor for a customer in deciding whether to switch banks. Banks need to adopt technology to empower their customers and enhance their customer experience. AI technology can provide quality and memorable customer experiences. Walking through a myriad of technology terms such as platformification, conversational AI, NLP, deep learning, data analytics, chatbots, etc and choosing the right technology to implement can be daunting indeed.
Have you used chatbots or digital assistants as a banker or as a customer? Please share your experience.
It can really surprise business owners to realize how many benefits they can get from a conversational AI chatbot. As the article points out, one of the benefits is consistent service. After all, the chatbot can more easily learn what works for the customer and apply that technique to them.