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Businesses of all kinds are always looking for more ways to save money and become more efficient. According to a study by Juniper Research, operational savings for banks will grow by 3400% or $7.3 billion from 2019 to 2023 by using chatbots. This will save banks 862 million hours.
If you are a customer service or IT manager at a bank, you might want to know exactly how banks use AI chatbots to enhance their customer experience. Keep reading to find out how banks are using chatbots and why you need to start using chatbots as well.
Conversational AI Chatbots Change the Customer Service Experience
Customers of the 21st century are impatient and eager to get on with their day. They want to finish their interaction with customer service agents quickly without much of a wait time and then get back to binging on Netflix or spending time with their families. That's why using artificial intelligence can be such a boon in this regard.
No matter how much you try, you are never going to be able to give immediate customer service to your clients using human agents. It's almost impossible, no matter how many people you hire.
But with conversational AI chatbots, the landscape is quite different. Your customers can interact with a chatbot and get their questions answered in a matter of minutes, especially since a lot of questions are repetitive and can be programmed into your chatbot easily.
Even if the client has typos in their questions or is using other languages, your chatbot can answer their questions easily.
Reduce Wait Times
This is the biggest benefit of getting chatbots for your bank. This doesn't mean that your customers will never interact with a human agent again. The AI chatbots for banking are only the first line of defense, so to speak.
In most cases, customers will be satisfied with the answers they receive from the chatbot, going on their merry way. When they are not satisfied, it's easy enough for them to click a button that asks for a live agent, who can drop in and answer more complex questions.
This helps your wait times in two ways. First, those customers who are asking simple questions will not clog up the call lines, waiting to speak to an agent. The chatbot can take care of their needs easily.
Second, your human agents can then focus on customers with more complex needs, which is what you hired them for. It will also make work more interesting for your agents, as they aren't spending all their time fending off boring, basic inquiries, reducing employee turnover.
Increase Customer Retention
Customers want to feel like they are heard and that financial institutions care about them. They are tired enough of dealing with all the other things going on in their life, they don't want to spend more time than necessary dealing with their banks on the phone.
The faster you can answer their questions and get them back to their day-to-day life, the happier they will be. This doesn't mean that they don't want a satisfactory answer, but they want it fast, and without too much interruption to their day.
Unfortunately, sometimes customers spend hours waiting to speak to a customer service representative. These wait times were even more ridiculous during COVID times. Just because the pandemic is done and over with, doesn't mean that you shouldn't take the lessons learned during it and use them to improve your customer service in the future.
Chatbots are going to be essential in the future, if or when another pandemic comes along, or when banks get pressured to provide instant customer service to clients.
24/7 Support at Your Customer’s Fingertips
Are you providing 24/7 support to your clients right now? To save costs, some banks have started cutting down on customer service hours, keeping them from 7 am to 9 pm or something around that period.
But what if your customer needs help outside those hours? What if they do shift work and can't call during your business hours? What if your emergency line, if you have one, is so inundated with calls that wait times are horrendously long?
That's why chatbots for financial institutions are essential. They can help you provide 24/7 support to your clients, so they can get their questions answered even when your human agents are at home and off work.
Seamless Integrations Into One Single Software
Whatever customer service software you are working with right now, chatbots can integrate seamlessly with all of them. For example, Aivo can integrate with your banking systems, so that your chatbot will have access to the current card balance, account transactions, card activation for international use, and more.
This way you can bridge your customer service among all the different platforms you use. In addition, your chatbot will also work with all the different channels you use.
You can talk to your customers on any channel they prefer, like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, or on your website. If you restrict your chatbot to only one channel, then you are going to miss out on all those customers who don't use that particular channel.
For instance, Facebook messenger used to be the messenger of choice earlier on. But now Whatsapp is becoming more popular and common.
As time goes on, this might change as well to some other messenger (like Telegram, perhaps). Your chatbot can get integrated into all these channels, allowing your customer flexibility and choice.
Your chatbot will give automated answers on these omnichannels. It will exceed customer's expectations day after day answering your client's questions 24/7.
Also if the client needs to do any transactions, they can use Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication or One-time Password (OTP) to authenticate themselves, so security is never compromised.
You are constantly listening to the chatbot and the answers it receives. Mine all this data to improve the customer experience.
Related Article: 7 Ways Artificial Intelligence Will Change Fintechs
Improve Your Live Chatbot’s Performance Using Analytics
A transactional bot used in banks is a highly sophisticated piece of software. It's constantly learning and improving itself.
You can also check out analytics attached to all chatbots for banking to see how you can improve performance. Aivo has all these operating reports to share with you:
- Operations general dashboard
- Transferred sessions
- Conversations and interactions
- Satisfaction and feedback
- Labels
- Chat reports
If there are questions that are asked repeatedly but aren't stored in the chatbot's database yet, then you can add those in. If there are questions that are never asked, then you can remove those.
Also, if you see that the chatbot is constantly fumbling with a particular question causing people to get frustrated, you can work with the sales rep for the chatbot to get that fixed.
All this to say chatbots aren't static. They are constantly molding and adapting to the questions customers ask. Thus, they get better and better at anticipating customer needs and answering their questions.
Increase ROI and Improve NPS
The reason so many banks are switching over to using chatbots is that it directly affects your bottom line. As a customer service agent, your bonuses and contracts will be dependent upon wait times and customer satisfaction levels. A chatbot helps with these both.
Also, the more satisfied your customers are, the more likely it is that they will stick with you for a long time to come, purchasing several different products from you, thus, boosting your ROI.
For a customer service manager, NPS (net promoter score) is a key metric to measure and track. A conversational AI chatbot can help with that as well. It can get integrated directly into the chatbot so that right before your client is about to sign off, a single-question survey gets presented to them.
This can ask them how likely they are to recommend the service, product, or company to a friend or colleague. Because it's a single question and easy to answer, most clients will be inclined to quickly click on the number from 1 to 5. The more answers you can get for this survey, the more information you have on how well your bank is doing in your client's eyes.
What gets measured gets improved. Knowing what your clients think about your business is the first step to changing or improving it.
Use Chatbots to Boost Customer Experience
If you have never considered using conversational AI chatbots to improve your customer experience, you are missing out. Lots of your colleagues have already jumped on the bandwagon and are improving their ROI and NPS.
Don't get left behind. Book a demo to get a look inside our conversational AI solutions and find out how you can implement them in your business.
