How chat bots and voice are shaping the future of Banking and getting closer to your customers with conversational banking.
Article by Ravi Gupta (Digital Transformation Enthusiast)
What is conversational banking?
Conversational banking means interacting with a non-human about your finances, whether it’s checking your balance, finding out how much you spend on groceries or developing a budget.
“Conversational banking is about managing your financial life through voice or text,” A chat bot that currently works through Slack or SMS messaging to monitor income, expenses or set a budget.
Is this another money management app?
No. While you may need to download apps to let the technology work on your device, conversational banking is about using chat bots to text or speak questions or commands.
How does it work?
Many of these bots are instant messenger chatbots that interact with the user’s bank account. Abe, for example, connects to a bank through Yodlee, a financial data provider, using an encrypted token. These bots can tell users how much money is in their account, how much they spent on a particular type of expense and possibly make a budget.
Is this just a fancy way to say you’re using Siri or Amazon Alexa to manage your banking?
Conversational banking actually goes further than Siri or Amazon Alexa because it lets you communicate with the chat bot as if it were a real person. Advances in artificial intelligence have made financial chat bots able to ask and answer questions in familiar conversational language.
Completing the customer journey.
Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), text or voice applications can help customers monitor and manage their accounts, seek out and act on financial advice, review and purchase new products, and much more. These are all common customer journeys that can be completed without human intervention.
To be effective, conversational banking applications must:
1. Determine intent — Applications must determine intent within open-ended dialogs that often contain slang, dialects, abbreviations, and misspellings. They may narrow in on a customer’s intention by using examples, clarifications, and confirmations. Once intent is discovered, a predefined journey can guide the rest of the interaction.
2. Offer an exceptional experience — A good conversation is an enjoyable one, so applications should provide context and relevancy to each interaction. For example, a text-messaging interface can use pictures and video to help move a customer through the journey of opening a new bank account.
3. Provide context — A some point in the customer’s journey, he/she may need assistance from another application or a human agent. Preserving a transcript of the conversation for a smooth hand-off is essential for creating a closed loop and reducing friction when completing the customer’s request.
4. Ensure privacy and security — Depending on the origin of the conversation, such as on a third-party social media site, the application should avoid transmission of Personally Identifying Information (PII) by moving the conversation to a secure web form or the bank’s mobile app, or by linking accounts.
When deployed effectively, conversational banking can provide unique insights about the customer, while improving efficiency by fulfilling customer needs without human intervention.
