AI First — A must for banks
Bottom Line Up Front: Conversational interfaces should be the first interaction channel presented to customers across all “channels” with AI directing the engagement to the best resource available for a given customer intent, including meeting their needs right then and there with no further “navigation” of your digital assets.
I speak with bankers regularly about their digital engagement strategies and I’m struck by a particular phenomenon I see in North American banks.
Banks have many channels, and customers in North America are accustomed to having them all available. Branch, phone banking, ATM, email support, call center, chatbots, mobile app, online portal, FAQs and traditional mail — that’s 10 channels with which clients can interact with many banks.
This presents bankers with a set of challenges implementing AI powered “conversational interfaces”.
- Customer Overload — How many channels do customers want? Are we making it simple and clear to them how to accomplish what they want? Do we risk overwhelming them with choices by adding yet another channel?
- Channel conflict within the bank — These channels compete internally for customer engagement with each other. Each channel measures its success independently. Even though there is a desire to have an overall “attribution model”, in reality it’s very hard to do. A chatbot is seen as yet another channel that competes with the others for resources and strategic focus.
- Inconsistent experiences — Let’s say you want to roll out spending analyses and insights to help your customers save and budget. Should the bank built that capability out in the online portal, the mobile app and the chatbot? What about the contact center — shouldn’t those reps have those insights to make recos to clients? What about the IVR — should they be there too?
Build better voice apps. Get more articles & interviews from voice technology experts at voicetechpodcast.com
Banking customers are focused on digital experiences primarily now, and mobile apps are taking the lead in almost all age groups. And even with 55–64 bracket, mobile is increasing as a preference (see the graphic below).
A conversational user interface provides an opportunity to differentiate based on a truly different and more customer-oriented experience. The reality is your bank’s mobile app just isn’t that much better than other banks, same for your online portal or call center. How can you differentiate significantly there? Answer: You can’t and over time it is getting worse. Even a 3 billion asset credit union can put out a good mobile app and portal. Stuffing more functionality into those apps is not the answer.
AI First is a strategy that can utterly change your customer’s experience. When they search for something (whether on the public web or your apps/channels), are they driven to a chatbot? Are you presenting the ability to just ask your bank questions about what they care about? Do they have one place to go to interact with you that they can count on? Fyi, it can be presented in the portal and the mobile app and the public website — it needs to be everywhere.
At first, AI can handle well known FAQs and frequent support cases, and be the “traffic cop” for all other inquiries. Why would you do this? To radically reduce the calls coming into your contact center, many of which can already be handled by your existing self -serve assets but it’s just too inconvenient for your clients to find them.
Then AI can learn what your customers want to talk about. Over time, we can make the chatbot very intelligent and engaging, providing insights, balances, transactional information and even on-boarding and transaction processing.f
The benefit of an AI powered conversational interface is in its simplicity and easy of use. Customers are free to tell you what they want versus having to put the effort in to navigate your apps to find it. It’s a huge difference and clients love it.
Let me be clear though — there is no silver bullet. While my firm has a pre-trained finserv model with many intents already developed for banks and asset managers, the truth is that each bank’s model needs to be developed uniquely as well (if you are interested in how we do this…). Over time, the conversational AI will become very robust via training and development.
The endgame?40-50% reduction in calls to the call center is achievable while delivering highly differentiated experiences that can be competitive advantages for your bank with an AI First strategy.
