3 Ways Conversational AI Can Be Used to Improve Banking Customer Service

Delivering an interactive and engaging customer support service is one of the topmost priorities of any business.

With the ever-growing customer expectations, brands and businesses are under pressure to create and deliver super-personalized customer experiences to increase customer trust and loyalty. Conversational AI has a great potential to improve customer service and satisfaction in the financial, retail, and banking industries.

Gartner’s made a report recently, and one of the findings is pretty relevant here. They say that, by 2022, 20% of service interactions with customers that banks and businesses have will be handled by AI. Specifically conversational AI. The market itself is set to grow from $4 billion to $5 billion by 2024.

Thus, conversational AI in banks has allowed them to restructure their customer support strategy and deliver a better customer experience.

In this article, we see what conversational AI is and three ways it can be used to improve customer banking service and experience.

What is conversational AI?

As customers are getting used to interacting with chat tools for customer support like chat assistants, chatbots, and voice commands, it is difficult to have a meaningful, flowing conversation with the automated chat functions.

This is where conversation AI comes into the picture.

Conversational AI aims to understand human tone and interaction. Additionally, it also tries to speak like real people in that it’ll be good at creating organic conversations. The idea is to offer a more realistic, engaging, and conversational interaction experience.

The most common and critical element or component of these technologies is empathy. These technologies include

• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
• Machine Learning
• Sentiment analysis

How does Conversational AI help banks improve customer service?

Here are three ways in which Conversational AI banking is helping banks improve and create a robust customer support service.

1. Faster query resolution times

This is Money found in August 2020; it took 3 hours for customers to contact a human agent when contacting their bank. So even if it was the middle of the pandemic, conversational AI is of utmost importance in such situations.

Conversational AI makes it easier to interact with devices and applications as it can understand human input better- eliminating the need for customers to type in more and the right combination of words to ensure that they are understood and get their queries resolved.

Unlike a simple chatbot, a Conversational AI assistant deals with more complex and complicated conversations, solving customers’ queries and issues much faster and effectively than a traditional chatbot.

This faster and accurate query resolution saves a lot of time and takes off the pressure and responsibility of serving customers from human customer service teams, speeding up the bank’s overall operational efficiency and responsiveness.

2. Personalized follow-ups and recommendations

Conversational AI draws and uses customer data across the organization to gain full knowledge of the customer journey. It uses this data to understand customers’ behavior, spending habits and patterns, the products they view the most and offer personalized responses and suggestions through predictive analysis.

Such cross-promotion of products and services through targeted and hyper-personalized recommendations is a much more successful strategy for banks than direct promotions.

The more efficiently AI feeds on data quality and enhances its knowledge, the more it helps banks ensure quality and consistent customer experience across all channels and touchpoints.

3. Improved customer experience

When conversational assistant AI uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze customer queries or input and deliver the best possible response, it significantly improves customer satisfaction and overall experience.

It makes customers feel heard, which is critical for call centers and the banking industry.

Based on previous interactions and conversations, AI predicts what the customer might need next, making it easier to follow switches in context with a natural flowy conversation.

For example, suppose in the middle of a conversation, a customer asks a query. In that case, AI addresses and resolves the query, offering relevant information and returning the conversation to the original query.

This feature and benefit reduce customer wait and frustrations, encouraging them to resolve as many queries as possible through conversational AI, improving the overall customer experience.

Such a smoother and realistic conversation experience enables human agents to focus on other critical aspects of the banking business, improving overall operational efficiency and sales performance.

Conclusion

Online banking and chatbot/messaging services are the preferred mode of communication for several customers.

Conversational AI is an effective smart conversion tool that helps banks:

• Offer assistance to apply for multiple banking products and services in a natural conversational manner.
• Sends personalized suggestions and recommendations, offering timely support and preventing customer drop-offs.
• Such enhanced customer experience improves banks’ conversion rates, positively impacting overall banking revenue and growth.

Check out interface.ai for more details. interface.ai’s intelligent self-service suite of products enables financial institutions to create efficiencies through automation, have high personalized customer interactions, offer industry-best security and also create new sources of revenue.