13 REASONS Why your bank needs an AI chatbot

Gartner predicts that in 2020, organizations using AI tech will achieve long-term success 4 times more than others. Considering the exponential expansion and influence of AI and its exceptional value, adopting this technology is no longer a choice, but a need, for banks.

Here are 13 reasons why your bank needs AI chatbots:

1. Revenue Increase

“The language of business is revenue, and that is completely tied to pipeline creation and progression,” says Paula Parkes, Director Marketing, Asia Pacific, Adobe.

Prospects drop off while browsing your website or during chats and form-fills leading to lower conversion rates and revenue. Drop-off can be as high as 98% for some businesses, especially financial services, resulting in a meager 2% conversion.

AI tech is being successfully used to engage website visitors or prospects calling a company IVR, quickly provide information that aids their purchase process, guide them in filling forms, collecting info, etc.

Organizations have reported huge reductions in lead drop-off along the marketing funnel and a significant increase in conversion rates post implementing AI tech.

2. Cost Saving

Customer support is a necessary, but expensive, business function. Organizations typically spend 3% of revenue or up to 30% of their profits on support. A majority of the support queries are repetitive and AI chatbots can efficiently take care of these calls freeing up time for the support staff to focus on value-adding transactions.

The bigger your customer service function the higher your savings will be. Payjo’s customers have reported savings of millions of dollars within a year of deploying customer service AI bots.

3. Customer Engagement

Customers expect quick and accurate responses to their inquiries. They also expect flexibility in communicating through any channel of their choice and convenience – mobile app, website, IVR, Facebook messenger, etc.

AI chatbots can integrate with all of these channels, even social, and engage with customers 24x7x365. Providing 24×7 support, 365 days a year, using teams of support personnel is a difficult and costly endeavor for organizations. But, with AI tech, a single bot deployed can handle millions of support conversations a day, all days of the year.

4. Customer Experience

Millennials are the majority or key customers for most businesses. Understanding their mindset and catering to their behavioral patterns is a top priority for organizations around the world.

AI chatbots can understand your customers, respond intelligently to their questions, assist self-service and even provide recommendations based on their behaviors and buying patterns. This tech can evolve to be the customer’s own intelligent personal assistant. AI can elevate personalize customer experience to new levels.

5. Business Efficiency

Organizations around the world are widely deploying Artificial Intelligence for process automation. For example, banks have been using AI chatbots internally to train and assist new hires in customer service teams. These chatbots also improve the customer service process efficiency and the agent’s productivity by taking care of routine inquiries.

Recent examples also include the use of AI tech for processing employee service requests, analyzing legal documents, etc.

6, 7 & 8. Compliance, Risk and Fraud Management

Real-time risk and compliance management are possible with AI-powered compliance management solutions. AI compliance solutions can collect data from regulatory feeds and compare it with the company’s internal data and suggest the right next steps. AI implementations can track money laundering, wire fraud, etc. in real-time and flag suspicious activities or alert appropriate departments within the bank to initiate action.

9. Competitive Advantage

A study by IDC indicates that 94% of companies believe Machine Learning is key to competitive advantage. Be it the increasing efficiency of business processes or enhancing the customer experience to increase retention, AI has the potential for a huge impact.

Practical applications include AI store assistants that make shopping more fun to AI programs that streamline manufacturing, logistics, and utilities.

With growing customer demand for personalized digital experiences, efficient operations and faster delivery of services businesses can now reimagine their business processes for competitive advantage.

10. Data Analytics

Some businesses, especially financial services and healthcare, collect huge amounts of customer data. These unstructured and structured data have to be processed and analyzed to identify patterns, trends, and actions that enable business decisions.

The more the data, the better the AI tech can be at learning and predicting accurate outcomes for your business.

11. Business Insights

“CEOs care about P&Ls and balance sheets… Understand where your company’s revenue comes from, what the levers for revenue and cost are,” says Apurva Chamaria, Global Head of Corporate Marketing, HCL Technologies Ltd.

AI tech can reduce the time spent by CXOs on operations and business risk management by providing key metrics in real-time, quickly. Top management can use data to focus on strategic business objectives – identify new business opportunities, drive revenue growth, and understand if their team’s efforts are delivering the results that the business needs.

12. Inclusion

Progressive organizations are using digital AI technology to improve accessibility to their products and services for customers with disabilities.

While web-based and mobile financial services are an ideal way to meet the needs of differently-abled customers, these customers have been traditionally inadequately served by businesses. Using AI chatbot to assist customers organizations can go beyond basic requirements and ensure that ‘all’ customers are provided an equal experience.

13. Employee Satisfaction

AI chatbot can take care of a number of routine and repetitive tasks in services, manufacturing, etc. For example, as mentioned earlier, AI bots have shown remarkable results in handling customer queries that are repetitive thereby freeing up time for the support staff to focus on value-adding transactions.

The Automation Advantage report mentions an increase in job satisfaction for 62% of employees engaged in routine and repetitive tasks, as they can focus on more creative and interpersonal activities.

I hope this post helps if you are thinking about whether your business needs AI. Do not deploy AI just because everyone else is doing it. Do it if your business demands it or rather has reasons to demand it.