Despite the rise of online and mobile banking, the contact centre is still the go-to destination for banking customers. While digital services have made basic and repetitive banking tasks more efficient, more complex customer requests still appear to require the intervention of a human contact centre agent or branch representative.
In recent years, banks have increasingly used chatbots to try and resolve some customer service requests. It’s true that this has helped deflect some user requests, but the technology has been limited by its inability to understand customers when they speak naturally over the telephone.
Since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, contact centres in every business sector have been firefighting in different ways – the biggest and most raging fire being staff turnover and burnout. 83% of contact centre staff are facing burnout, and 62% are looking to move to a new job in the near future. Another 52% say that their workload has increased since the beginning of the pandemic.
To solve this particular challenge, banks must be prepared to do more than just upgrade their existing online and mobile banking infrastructure. For many customers, phoning into a contact centre is the last resort and first they have to exhaust all other digital channels. For many customers, phoning customer service promises long waits, repetitive music, recorded messages on loop, security questions ad nauseum and a frustrating route to possible resolution.
But what if you could promise your customers that they would never have to wait on hold again and listen to THAT music? And what if you could guarantee to them that their queries would be resolved easily and they wouldn’t even get transferred between different departments to repeat themselves to new staff members?
An automated solution that could deliver on this whilst automating the majority of banking customer service calls would undoubtedly be beneficial for both banks and customers – and this is precisely what the next generation of conversational AI technology aims to achieve.
Transforming the contact centre
Mobile banking apps support a range of functions including checking balances, sending and receiving payments, managing product applications, and reporting lost cards – amongst other things. Partly due to the rise of digital-only banks, the majority of banking apps are at parity with this list of functions.
Chatbots can also perform many of these tasks, but not with panache – and almost always with rules-based systems (think glorified multiple choice). The next generation of AI assistant brings more than this to the table, and can automate the more complex queries that normally have customers reaching for the customer service line. Today the conversational AI assistant must do more than offer common rules-based functions, it needs to interact and resolve.
Conversational AI-powered virtual assistants have an expanded range of functionality. Here are just some of the tasks that these virtual agents can help banking customers with:
- Reporting fraudulent activity on customer accounts
- Applying for loans, mortgages, and credit cards
- Changing customer details on accounts
- Resetting passwords and memorable data
- Opening and closing accounts
- Managing savings and interest rates
- Restoring access to locked online accounts or mobile banking accounts
By offering these functions, virtual assistants allow users to make complex requests using a self-service channel. The technology can be deployed over the phone or through instant messaging. It can also be offered in-app to augment a mobile banking experience. These virtual agents aim to reduce points of friction in a bank’s digital experience, and in the process they enhance customer experience and ultimately their loyalty.
Furthermore, because conversational AI technology is designed to understand natural language, bringing in virtual agents has the potential to substantially reduce the workloads of existing human contact centre staff. When they need to spend less time handling repetitive but complex requests, human agents become free to focus on the more specialist and rewarding aspects of their job. By automating tasks, and by reducing staff turnover and burnout, conversational AI provides banks with considerable cost savings.
In many cases, conversational agents can resolve tasks faster than their human counterparts. Virtual assistants can be seamlessly integrated into the bank’s digital ecosystem so that they have instant access to information that might take a human agent several minutes to access. As a result, information moves seamlessly between the digital services, contact centres, and branches. That’s instant resolution of customer service queries 24/7. That’s also satisfied customers.
Extraordinary technology can only come from an exceptional supplier
At action.ai, our mission is to provide this next generation of sophisticated customer service technology for banks. We aim to build conversational technology that can automate the vast majority of banking customer service calls, free up human agents, and deliver exceptional service. Eschewing the more limited solutions that can be developed with low code and no code tools, we use best-in-class technology to shape bespoke conversational AI solutions for the banking sector.
We take a domain-specific approach. This means our conversational tech is trained specifically to function in a banking context in your bank. The technology has a deep understanding of financial terminology and is ready to assist with any banking-related query.
Your customers all have unique ways of expressing themselves, and our technology ensures they are always understood. We give you complete control over the tone of the conversation allowing you to craft a customer experience that effectively communicates your brand and values as a financial institution. With our technology in place, you can be confident that your customers will always be treated with the respect, empathy, and understanding that they deserve.
Our technology is backed by the latest advances in machine learning, natural language processing, and automatic speech recognition. Not only does this mean that our conversational AI has an unprecedented ability to find meaning in natural conversation, but it also enables us to process complicated user requests via speech over the phone. Users simply need to speak normally, and they will be understood first time and every time. Our speech recognition engine can even recognise the interruptions and hesitations that are a part of human conversation. The end result is that conversations with our virtual agents feel human-like and highly responsive.
We build conversational interfaces that are accessible, intuitive, and easy to use. When you work with us, you can be sure that the resulting conversational technology will make you extraordinary.
