The Power of Chatbots

Many companies got thrilled by some amazing opportunities that came with using the chatbots, but in reality many are struggling to prove a true value of using them, both for the customers and for the organization itself. Here are a few examples of how you can make the use of the chatbots relevant for your company, while increasing the satisfaction of your customers.

1.    Website - reimagined

For many years the websites of the financial institutions were a repository of internal documents, which from time to time were turned into rudimentary Questions and Answers, to make them a bit easier to use. In reality, rather than helping the customers they became a source of frustration and complaints as it the organization of information and the structure of the websites was always a reflection of how bankers thought about banking, not necessarily how customers thought about their banking needs.

Recently some organizations tested a “Google like” search engine on their sites which did not help much, as it was pointing customers to the same lengthy documents containing lots of industry jargon, fully understandable to the bankers only (and, truth to be told, not even to all bankers??).

A good example of reimagining rather than restructuring access to banking information via a website has been recently adopted by banks, who used the chatbots as a Virtual Concierge or Virtual Assistant to help navigate the information sites. Rather than searching through a number of different wireframes or web pages, the customer can chat with the bot, asking for relevant information and the bot is answering online, using the database of pre-prepared answers originating from the source documents.

The customers’ experience gets drastically improved as they can immediately get access to the information they need, by asking the question in the natural language i.e. in the way they communicate in their daily lives. They can forget about the banking jargon as the bots are trained to understand the meaning of the sentence, even when it is asked in a number of different ways.

 Putting a Virtual Assistant on the website is a good start for any bank to test the value and quality of the chatbot, as it is a low risk application (the data is still available to the customers in the old way), while it becomes an invaluable source of information on customer interest in the banking value proposition as well as source of costs saving as efficient chatbot can handle many queries which used to finally land in the contact centre.

 2.    “Contact us” – with instant resolution

Many online banking systems still have the little button called “Contact us” where the customer can send any text message in an unstructured format. Such messages are then analysed by an army of bank employees trying to figure out what the customer really wanted deciphering sometimes very criptic messages. In majority of the cases banks eventually need to contact the customer to resolve the query which delays the resolution and makes it very inefficient.

There is a solution to that problem though. A little envelope next to the “Contact us” button can be replaced by the bot who will ask the customer about the issue and will attempt to resolve it while on line with the customer. It will refer the query to the database of ready made answers or connect with the transactional systems, in order to provide the customer with the required information or will take action (for example: changing the address or blocking the card).

The additional power of that solution is that the bot can handle sensitive information requests by the customers, as the whole interaction is happening in a secure post login/post password environment.

Some banks started using live agent within their mobile applications, which works great for the customer, as they usually leave the chat with the issue fully resolved. It still, however, requires a significant involvement of people which makes it quite inefficient from the banks’ perspective.

 Using of the bots, provided they are mature and well trained, is therefore achieving efficiencies on both the customer as well as on the bank side.

3.    Popular service calls with zero waiting time

For the last over 5 decades or longer, customers were trained to use the phone line in order to resolve their queries and issues. For years, banks were proud that contact center is drawing people out of the branches hence making the cost of service much lower.

The increased competition and usage of technology to drive costs down has brought the traditional agent-operated contact centers under a major scrutiny. People started analyzing the most frequent issues the customers call the bank about. And as usual, the old Pareto rule worked very well. Eighty per cent of all calls were related to twenty per cent of top issues the customers wanted to resolve.

SMSs with daily balance or simplified way of checking it via a mobile application have taken care of the ones that related to access to information on balance and transactions. More difficult ones like for example reporting a lost/stolen card and asking for replacement are now increasingly managed using the chatbot technology.

How does it work? Very simply, a customer gets redirected from a phone call to a chatbot that handles his request on line, including blocking of the card, confirming mailing address and automatically requesting issuance of the card through a straight through back end process. The huge benefit for the customer lies in the speed of action. In the time of stress, when action needs to be taken fast, they don’t need to wait on the line to get connected to the next available agent.

The bot is always there for them 24 hours a day/7 days a week. And for the bank it is again a case of huge savings on the involvement of staff, which can be redirected to a more value- adding tasks servicing the customers.

 4.    Customer insights

With the growth of the banked population and a constant increase of the affluent customer base, the possibility to reach each and every customers with personalised service, had drastically decreased as the cost of servicing them has increased.

A solution to the dilemma of high levels of service versus reasonable price, has recently been resolved using the chatbots as a channel, combined with a usage of advanced analytics.

These days in many banks the bot will inform us that our time deposit is expiring soon and we have an option to renew it or invest in potentially more profitable instruments. It can advise us on the irregularities in our spending or sudden spike in one category of our spend, which we might not have noticed. The bot can also suggest putting certain amount of money aside to a higher yield banking account, by analysis our regular inflows and outflows out of our account.

While at the beginning the bot will ask for permission with every action, to make us comfortable, in the future I can imagine we will feel comfortable enough with leaving the simple decisions to the bot itself, hence saving a lot of our time while maximizing our returns. 

The above examples represent just a fraction of the use cases that banks can think about in relation to utilizing the chatbots in order to increase customer satisfaction and decrease costs. Interestingly not all of them work in the same way in different countries, various regulatory environments or cultures. It is therefore always important to test the use case in a contained environment for example starting with the employees and then expand to a limited customer base. Not each and every case will be equally successful which should not stop us to keep trying to come to an optimum set of scenarios for the customers and the bank.