According to a McKinsey study, of the top 100 banks by assets and other digitally advanced banks, four out of five have partnered with at least one fintech company. This is indicative of how technology adoption is central to the success strategies of banking institutions.
Banks have always been at the forefront of adopting new technologies to streamline their operations and drive efficiency. Most banks have done away with queues and have migrated to a superior digital banking experience. However, customer needs change at a rapid pace.
Customers are showing a preference for improved digital engagement with their bank via free form text, or chat messengers. Banking institutions are expanding their support operations and deploying virtual assistants to engage with customers better and faster.
The universe of a customer’s queries is majorly made up of balance inquiries, bank account details, information on loans, and product offerings, among others. Resolutions to these queries are often generic and can be handled by a chatbot efficiently. Deploying this technology can enable customer service representatives to focus on complex issues at hand and provide a comprehensive resolution to customers.
Banking Processes That Can Be Transformed with Chatbots
Customer notifications and recommendations
Virtual assistants like chatbots can handle the task of sending out notifications to customers, balance information, and sharing of money-saving tips. Chatbots also enable customers with frequent credit report updates, facilitating payments, and helping them perform simple transactions. These capabilities can be expanded to help customers make smarter financial decisions by providing them with personalized and proactive insights.
Ease of access to information
Banks have to deal with humungous data that needs to be fetched from multiple sources. Intelligent bots powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP) have an ability to comprehend a range of user queries and retrieve information from thousands of possible sources in milliseconds. Accessing information regarding a customer’s branch address, IFSC code, and interest rates are some queries that the bots can handle with ease. They can be deployed across platforms such as Google Assistant and Alexa to answer questions with accuracy.
FAQs on banking products and services
Banks can deploy bots to give customers information about their wide range of products and services. Routine queries and FAQs about banking services can be easily handled by bots, which can gradually learn to respond to more complex and broader questions over time by processing and to analyze customer feedback.
Customer Support
Chatbots can engage in more compelling conversations to handle a wide variety of customer support queries. They can be plugged into every conceivable customer touchpoints to interact with customers, ask them about their problems, and give them direct solutions or redirect to a customer support executive.
Engage on social media channels
Banks can deploy chatbots on social media channels such as Facebook Messengers to interact with the customers seamlessly. For instance, every time customers make purchases with their credit cards; a push notification can be sent to their Messenger account. The bot can provide contextual recommendations based on the user’s purchase history, real-time sales notifications, and information regarding credit card benefits and loyalty program features. In addition to this, the bot also responds to standard customer support queries.
Lead Generation
Email campaigns and cold calls are losing steam quickly. A conversational interface offers less intrusive lead generation methods that are likely to be more appealing for prospective customers.
These lead generation tools embedded on the bank’s website or mobile application initiate conversations with users. Based on the understanding of their banking needs, the bots pose queries to customers and offer suggestions. Those customer conversations which are qualified as leads are then sent to respective teams for further follow-up.
As chatbots evolve, we can see a shift from mobile banking to Conversational User Interface (CUI) that mimics human conversations. This would require a comprehensive conversational banking strategy and investment in AI development and NLP. Get in touch with us to integrate chatbot functionality and upgrade your bank’s customer experience.
