Today, companies are incorporating artificial intelligence as a part of their digital strategy. Banks and financial institutions are not an exception. The rise in the chatbots usage is the new trend in the banking industry.
Artificial intelligence is changing the way how the banking industry communicates with their customers. Artificial intelligence has helped in leveraging the popularity of messaging apps. The latest conversational banking has proved to be an unprecedented user experience and improved the customer and bank relationship.
What are Chatbots?
Chatbots is a program that can have a conversation with a human. Chatbots can interpret, analyze and give the response to the user based on several algorithms. This can be used as a tool by businesses for customer support service. With the help of chatbots, you can book a taxi, fix an appointment with your dentist or book a table in the restaurant.
Chatbots are build using Machine Learning algorithms that can learn from past behavior and get better over time. It is estimated that in the upcoming years, over 90 percent of customer support will be replaced by chatbots. Chatbots also provide a cost-effective solution to the customer support service.
Artificial Intelligence software companies are coming up with the solution for customer support services in the form of chatbots. Chatbots are being used by big businesses for a long time. But they have become more popular among small businesses also.
Why should chatbots be used?
The advantages of using chatbots are:
1. Chatbots do not require frequent breaks as they do not get tired.
2. Chatbots helps in automating the human interaction task. They can be used where there is a need for communication with the humans.
3. Chatbots can be used in hospitals and clinics for the customer support service. Patients can interact with the chatbots. Chatbots can fix appointments, handle patient queries and also can provide necessary information to the patients.
Now, let us have a look at how chatbots can help banks and financial institutions.
24/7 Customer Support
AI Chatbots are available 24/7 for the customer support service. To serve the customers with a personalized approach is the key to growth for banks and financial institutions. Without customer satisfaction, no business can withstand the competition in the market. Chatbots can perform operations like updating the customer’s KYC, providing information about new schemes and policies, various bank rates etc. Chatbots are built using Natural Language Processing Technology which enables it to communicate in a natural way and customer do no get a feeling that they are chatting with a machine.
Customer Feedback
Chatbots are a valuable channel to get the customer feedback from the clients. Different branches around the globe will analyze the usage rate and obtain feedback from each customer. By analyzing the overall feedback, management can refine their policies and make necessary changes. AI chatbots over the internet are helping the banks to improve their internal communications also and to gather meaningful insights from different branches. Therefore, Chatbots can be used both for the internal as well as external communication.
Fraud Prevention
Fraudsters are attracted where money is involved. Banks and financial institutions have to deal with monetary transactions on daily basis. So, it becomes important for them to protect their money from hackers and cybercriminals. For example, if you use the card in a different country, the bank will notify you and block the card. It will then confirm that it was you who was using the card. But this process may take some time. Banks can take the help of chatbots and can confirm the user identity. This will make the system secure, speed up the payment process and also improve the user experience.
Employee Self Service
Chatbots can also help in the human resource management system of the banks. Employees can raise a request to update his/her details. Employees can apply for leaves, access their personal data, review timesheet, update contact details, review overtime payment, submitting the reimbursement slips. All without much of human interaction.
Analyzing the Data
Chatbots are one of the best data analyzing tools for banks. Chatbots are operated by providing customers the answers based on their specific queries. Chatbots can provide an overall view of the data. By analyzing the data, bank management can get to know the most common reasons why customers are calling the customer service or the areas where they are getting the best services. Customers will only reach out to the banks if they are having issues with the system and are not able to resolve it on their own. The customers reach out to the banks for fraud activities, traveling abroad banking restrictions or checking the credit card balance.
Automating these tasks can help to speed up the process and a better user experience. It can also help in gathering the useful data which can be helpful in getting powerful insights. Chatbots can become a great data analytics tools for banks.
Brand Consistency
Chatbots are excellent tools to provide brand consistency, tone, and message to the clients. When the client calls the customer care executive, there is a variation in the approach, attitude, and knowledge from person to person. People working in the customer support delivers different types of services based on different factors like interest, fatigue, boredom, personal interest, topic knowledge and many more. As far as chatbots are concerned, they are not affected by any of these factors and give consistent results. Chatbots provides uniform customer service to all the clients.
Lower Response Time
No one in the world wants to wait an hour before reaching an operator. It is the ultimate insult for the customers if you make them wait for that long. Customers have to wait for longer periods due to internal or external factors. For example, a new software release may increase the queries of the customers. This will increase the number of calls to the customer support staff creating a huge traffic of calls. On the other hand, chatbots can handle the clients simultaneously and can scale up easily according to the situation.
Conclusion
Chatbots are becoming an integral part of the banking institutions. Artificial intelligence applications have changed the way how business interact with each other as well as with the clients. For the past forty years, phone calls have been the most common ways of interacting with the clients. But now artificial intelligence based chatbot support is now taking place of phone calls. Banks are now adopting chatbots as they are guaranteed to improve the customer satisfaction and sales.
