Today’s companies are racing towards artificial intelligence to make it a big part of their digital strategy. The rise of chatbots in finance and banking sectors is the latest wave of new technologies adopted. Particularly in the banking industry, it is changing the face of the communication interface by adopting Artificial Intelligence.
Leveraging the strength of artificial intelligence and increasing popularity of messaging apps, conversational interfaces are enabling unprecedented banking engagement and re-establishing relationship banking.
Why the banking industry needs Chatbot?
Introducing chatbots in the banking sector can bring a huge change in customer experience and keep up the pace with changing customer expectations.
Chatbot has the potential to automate all the repetitive questions which are time-consuming and has a huge impact on the department’s performance. No matter the use-case, banks are now stepping forward to use chatbots to simplify the overall banking experience for the customers.
Banking Chatbot Use Cases:
Personal Banking services
Gone are the days of standing in long queues at the bank and filling out paperwork to access general banking services.
Introducing chatbots in the banking industry improves overall customer satisfaction and engagement. Customers can check account balance or simply ask for a statement of the transactions using a simple interface with the help of chatbots.
To execute these account-related activities, a unique identifier is provided by the customer to get authorized and access account data. Transferring funds to an inter-bank or third party by certain authentication methods can save customers time and workload to bankers.
Customers can also get a quick view of their earnings and expenditure from customers previous data and the plotted graph can show how much they will spend in coming months.
Uninterrupted customer support
Customers served with a most personalized approach is the key to growth. Without customer satisfaction, no organization can sustain for long in the market. In the banking industry, it is necessary to provide 24×7 customer support.
Chatbots will help with tasks like resolving queries, options to update client KYC, provide information on new schemes and services around the clock. They ensure that the customer’s queries are solved in the shortest period and never let customers feel that they are interacting with a machine.
Customer feedback & measurements
All the branches around the globe will analyze their individual usage rate on the available schemes and obtain feedback from each customer. Based on the overall feedback, management can further consider refining existing schemes or implement new plans.
Digital collaboration networks like intranet form the basic building block for gathering meaningful insights to gain business efficiency and smooth workflows. Imagine a chatbot on such intranets helping employees access the information with just a conversation.
Intranet-based chatbot can help employees for better internal communication to gather insights from different branches and help the core management to take further innovative steps.
Hence, it gives a win-win for both employees in gaining meaningful insights and banks in gaining productivity.
“By 2022, 40% of customer-facing employees and government workers will consult daily an AI virtual support agent for decision or process support.”
Delivering Personalized Marketing
The banking industry has a wide range of products and services for its customers. But, not all customers are attentive to every service.
Chatbots can deliver personalized offers to customers based on their profile data or life events. Highly-targeted products and services are brought to the customers at the right time by the preferred messaging apps which can intensely increase conversion rates.
By using this channel for communication, banks can achieve a higher market value without annoying the customer.
Employee self-service
An employee should login to HRMS and raise a request to update his details or access personal records or payroll details or transact with the Human Resource officials personally.
If this process is carried out using chatbots, employees can apply leave, access personal details, payroll details, update contact details, reviewing of the timesheet, requesting for overtime payment, viewing of compensation history and submitting of reimbursement slips without much of human intervention.
Employees can chat with the bot and ask to raise a request on their behalf so that they can better utilize their work hours and increase productivity.
Employee self-service portal may be operated on an intranet or via a web service.
Benefits of using chatbots in banking industry:
- Chatbots are the new 24/7 customer service tool that can operate without any human interface once they’re set up.
- Help to automate fraud prevention processes and collect critical information from potentially impacted bank users.
- Push relevant content to end users and analyze user engagement.
- Lead an organization’s personalized methodology and create incremental income.
- Makes your brand identity more consistent with one voice, one message, one tone for each client.
- Run smoothly during peak traffic times, which means that the response rate will remain consistent, resulting a great user experience.
Here are some recent examples of the world’s biggest banks which are using chatbots to boost their business:
Bank of America:
Being one of the biggest banks in the USA, Bank of America (BoA) is riding the tide of AI-powered chatbots in the financial sector.
A year ago, the organization introduced Erica, a voice-and-text empowered chatbot for clients. Erica had commended as an advanced virtual assistant to help clients make smarter decisions.
Erica helped in sending notifications, suggests ideas how a customer can save money, gives reports on their FICO score, and encourages payment of bills within the banking application.
JPMorgan Chase:
Even though chatbots are often used to automate repetitive tasks, the biggest U.S. bank JPMorgan is utilizing bots to streamline its back-office operations.
They recently launched COIN, a bot which can analyze complex legitimate contracts quicker and more proficiently than human lawyers. Since its launch a year ago, the bot has helped JPMorgan spare more than 360,000 hours of labor.
This chatbot additionally uses the technology to parse messages for employees, allow access to software systems, and handle basic IT requests like resetting passwords. Later, the organization intended to keep using bots to find a new source of income, decrease expenses and reduce the risks.
Capital One:
Capital One introduced Eno, a text-enabled chatbot that helps clients to deal with their money using their mobiles. Clients can get information from the chatbot about their account balance, transaction history, and credit limit as an instant message. It can even enable clients to pay their credit card bill in no time.
Eno is the second of Capital One’s virtual assistants after the organization launched its own Amazon Alexa a year ago. Alexa is a virtual assistant accepting inputs in the form of voice commands. This bot enables Capital One clients to know about upcoming payments, check account balances, and pay their credit card bill using their voice. Customers can even know the transaction history based on it, so that they can manage their future expenditure.
Conclusion
Unlike the traditional banking methods, chatbots can bring in a better and faster user experience providing 24×7 intelligent customer service.
Chatbots helps in streamlining the operations, automate customer support, and provide a more convenient and enjoyable customer experience.
Minimal setup, easy integration, and accessibility via a conversation medium are the key drivers in chatbot adoption.
