The days of communicating with human customer service reps are numbered. In fact, according to Gartner, around 85 percent of all customer interactions will be handled without a human agent by 2020.
For organisations in the financial services sector, there is opportunity in joining the ‘revolution in conversation’ by embracing AI-driven conversational platforms, otherwise known as chatbots. That’s primarily down to their ability to address key challenges currently facing the sector, including:
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The ability to provide affordable advice to consumers at scale
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Increasing and improving access to advice
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Disruption from innovative fintech startups and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms
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Regulatory pressure and increasing requirements around consumer protection.
Benefits of conversational chatbots
For financial service organisations, chatbots are an opportunity to increase self-service and self-sufficiency, while delivering a faster, more personalised customer experience and mitigating the need for more staff.
Let’s take a look at this in a little more detail:
1. Streamlined administration
As a conversational interface, chatbots are designed to conduct multi-topic automated conversations with your customers. They act as a virtual assistant, with the intention of immediately resolving administrative or compliance based queries, without relying on customer service resource in human form. Using AI algorithms and machine learning, the chatbot continues to ‘think less and learn more’, to further refine its responses and ability to resolve questions.
2. Reduced onboarding process
Tightening of regulatory requirements around Know Your Customer (KYC) and compliance due diligence has put increased pressure on on-boarding processes, often requiring multiple interactions with a customer to complete an application. An automated process using chatbot technology has the potential to dramatically reduce the time required by human resources, with much of the information received and verified online, freeing up your staff to deal with more challenging applications.
3. Greater personalisation
Customer expectations around service are changing in our demand-driven world. Digitally savvy users want instant access to information, specific to their requirements. Using chatbots, your organisation can deliver a consistent level of service, where user preferences are recorded, information is instantly at hand, and personalised assistance is available 24/7, right at your customers’ fingertips.
All this at a fraction of the cost of a human fulfilling the same role. What’s more, as a chatbot begins to learn more about a customer, it can also provide targeted cross-selling and marketing that improve a customer’s overall engagement with your business.
4. Data and insights for growth
The advantage that AI chatbot technology has, is the ability to extract and analyse previously siloed data that can provide powerful insight into who your customers are, their behaviour, their feedback, and their buying preferences, so you can define more detailed and accurate customer segments.
As your chatbot’s performance improves, so too does its ability to identify and offer relevant products to your customers, before they are even aware that they need them. Beyond existing products, these insights can also lead to innovation within your organisation, bringing new, relevant products to market, targeted to the needs of a specific audience.
5. Use of more intuitive platforms
Because chatbots leverage existing technology, there is no need to build or integrate bespoke messaging platforms. Chatbots adopt a more ‘intuitive’ means of communication and are designed to work on existing applications that your consumers are already using every day, such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. For consumers, this means there is no need to download additional apps or adapt existing behaviour on their mobile phone. For you, it means your business has the potential to deliver to market a new, powerful communication channel in a matter of weeks.
Customer service is an area of your business that has the potential to drive growth, yet also the area with the most risk when it is failing. In a competitive industry, financial service organisations need to find ways to outperform their peers when it comes to customer engagement. And as AI technology continues to improve, could these sophisticated conversational agents be the investment in customer experience your business needs to succeed?
Learn more about the benefits chatbots could bring to your business
Download our eBook, 'Chatbots, A conversation worth having'; where we go into more detail on how chatbots can make the most of your data, deliver a greater customer experience and enhance your digital transformation.
