The use of AI within the financial services industry has come a long way over the years. From the ability for banks to manage customers through chatbots to large institutions strategically garnering relevant information from their customers’ data, AI is having a massive impact on the financial services industry.
With the help of conversational AI, banks and financial service businesses can help grow their revenues, boost personalization, lower costs with automation, reduce human error, better utilize employee power, and transform both their agent and customer experiences for the better.
What we’ve seen so far within this industry still pales in comparison to where things are headed. If you’re familiar with Bank of America’s Erica or RBC’s NOMI, you’re well aware that there are virtual assistant tools available in this space, but that doesn’t mean they’re the best at what they say they do.
The financial services industry has reached a point where if a form of technology is going to be adopted and implemented, it needs to be capable of doing more than what our current options claim they can. Conversational AI is here for every point of the customer’s journey as well as the employee’s. AI is meant to augment humans on both the business and client side.
Why is Conversational AI Important For Financial Services?
There is much to be improved within the financial services industry, especially in terms of customer experience.Virtual assistants powered by the right technology can provide insight into customer finances and help them figure out more ways to save, invest, and make the most of their money.
On the business side of things, AI is designed to make customer support life easier and help businesses learn more from their customer interactions. As customers send in support requests seeking information, agents are seeing a massive queue of tickets continue to grow and grow. These tickets must be labeled and routed to the appropriate teams and when they get there, they still need to be thoroughly replied to. Often, support reps don’t know the answer to tickets and must scour the depths of knowledge bases to find them.
This entire process takes time and energy and includes components that could easily be automated to benefit everyone involved. Automation ends up saving companies time and money, making it worthwhile for many institutions.
How Do Companies Leverage Conversational AI for Financial Services?
There are many ways companies can leverage conversational AI for financial services. By automating a process or interaction within a customer’s journey to make a purchase, businesses provide themselves with an avenue for cost savings. Customers want to have their needs met quickly and agents want to be able to keep KPIs and team metrics every day—all of which can be done with the help of AI.
Here are five ways AI can help drive sales for businesses within the financial services industry.
Create a Better Customer Experience
Dealing with and managing people’s finances can be a taxing job. With millions of people trying to handle things on their own, there’s room for improvement in the current customer experience.
This is where conversational AI can truly shine for online banking and similar institutions. It can help explore new ways to provide additional benefits and comfort to individual users.
Consider a world where you log in to your banking app, know exactly where every single one of your dollars is going based on data of where it has gone in the past, where you have a virtual assistant telling you where to best allocate unspent funds, and suggesting new places to invest. A personalized experience can boost CX and make things easier for the end user.
Automate Solving Customer Problems
In the banking and financial services sector, people have support questions every single day. “How do I reset my password?” “Can I transfer funds?” “Who do I talk to about opening a new account?”
All of these questions are asked often and agents might reply to tickets like these hundreds of times per day, meaning answering them could be automated. By automating the repetitive stuff you free up agent time to get to more complex support questions that require further digging.
Accurately Label & Route Tickets Automatically
If there’s one part of the customer support journey that could very easily be automated, it is ticket labeling and routing. Automated ticket triaging involved evaluating and directing incoming tickets to the right person based on importance, topic, or urgency.
Many support teams are still using an individual agent for ticket routing. This means someone is at a desk all day long deciding where tickets should be sent. This leads to human error and mismanaged tickets.
By removing human error and using conversational AI to route your tickets, you’ll get much more accurate routing that is based on data of how you’ve historically routed and labeled your incoming data.
Reduce Customer Wait Times
Customers don’t want to wait. In fact, customers are only willing to wait a few minutes for customer support to follow through with their needs and if they don’t they leave and search for an alternative.
If your team is dealing with long wait times due to bottlenecks at different aspects of your customer’s journey, then conversational AI could be the best option. Virtual assistants powered by conversational AI can help reduce customer wait times and provide an improved customer experience. We’ve seen bots reduce response times by up to 45%.
Conversational AI can help customers self-serve to meet their needs as well as give support agents an assistant in helping them resolve customer issues by suggesting answers to customer queries based on data from past customer support needs.
Minimize Customer Service Costs
At the end of the day AI helps businesses do one very important thing: save time and money. It has been estimated that chatbots help businesses save more than $11 billion per year and that’s on top of saving mid-size companies the cost of agent interactions that could be used elsewhere.
It takes ample time to ramp customer support reps and with the help of AI you can reduce the time invested in training new agents and get them to start serving customers faster. Banks and financial services companies will be able to improve their CX and in turn boost their agent experience as well.
Frequently Asked Questions About Conversational AI For Financial Services
How Is Conversational AI Used In Financial Services?
In the financial services sector, conversational AI is used in a few ways. The most common way is powering the intelligent chatbots that provide customers with comprehensive self-help solutions while reducing the workload of support teams.
Artificial intelligence is not only there to support customers, it can also enable support representatives to improve how they manage customer interactions, as well as assist businesses with better data collection.
Why Is Conversational AI The Future of Financial Services?
AI is the future of customer service. It’s estimated that the potential for AI-driven cost savings for banks will reach $447 billion by next year and finserv businesses want to be at the forefront.
And that’s not to mention the trajectory that AI is currently on. Gartner predicts that this year alone AI will grow to a value of $62 billion.
What Is An Example of Conversational AI In Financial Services?
When’s the last time you needed to ask your bank a question? You might have had to find out how to turn off a recurring automatic payment. If so, you likely opened your bank app, clicked on the messaging icon meant for support questions, and typed in, “How to turn off recurring payments.” If this yielded an automatic answer and you were able to turn off the recurring payment, congrats! You just interacted with an AI tool.
AI can deflect the simplest and most frequent customer inquiries. Conversational AI chatbots learn from your customer and historical business data in order to understand what your customers are asking about most and then reply accordingly.