It’s time for banks to bring their “A” game to customer chat

As the digital revolution has gathered pace over the last decade, banks have increasingly switched to a digital service model, with the latest research^[1] suggesting two-thirds of Europeans are now managing their banking online.

Time to bring “A” game to customer chat

While banks have been able to cut costs and speed up delivery of basic account services, these improvements have created challenges, not least the challenge of being always available to respond to customer enquiries.

Sebastian van der Meer, Country Manager DACH at e-bot7 says low-quality customer engagement is lowering revenues and turning customers off. Here’s how to turn them back on.

In our experience, up to one-third of customer enquiries happen outside standard working hours – especially for the growing number of banking groups that work across time zones and international borders.

To help cope with this demand, financial institutions have turned to automated customer interaction tools to help them deal with customer enquiries.

The problem is that these chatbots have not always been a success, with customers expressing frustration about long wait times, poor interpretation of their enquiries and misdirected enquiries that leave human operators badly prepared to respond.

However, the software behind chatbots is constantly developing today.

Conversational AI: next-generation customer interaction

Rather than taking a rules-based approach, the next generation of customer engagement tools uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to interpret customer needs based on their neuro-linguistic patterning.

As we explained in a recent article for PCM, this new generation of chat tools interprets what customers want from how they use words, rather than just identifying keywords and providing standardised responses or connecting to human operators.

As well as interpreting customer needs more accurately, Conversational AI learns from customer responses to hone its accuracy and deliver better outcomes.

At e-bot7, our Conversational AI platform has achieved automation rates between 50 and 98% for clients, reducing the need for expensive and time-consuming human interaction.

We’ve achieved such high rates of automation through interpreting customers’ needs and rapidly referring customers to relevant product information and application processes.

Where human interaction is required, the better interpretative capabilities of our Conversational AI tool mean interactions are more effective, something that improves both customer satisfaction – and employee satisfaction with the content of their job.

Our system provides analytics in more than 75 different areas, from customer drop-offs in-chat to the type and number of queries answered for each product area.

Based on such data, financial institutions can improve their products and identify new product opportunities.

Some of our clients are already using the e-bot7 Conversational AI platform to generate new business leads based on customer needs identified in-chat.

Competition is getting much more intense in retail banking, given the rise of digital-only neobanks and non-bank financial institutions.

With recent research from McKinsey and Co. confirming^[2] that banks offering great customer service will also deliver superior financial performance, now’s the time for banks to raise their game and introduce a new generation of customer engagement tools.

Visit e-bot7 during Money 2020 at stand number F18 or find out more about next-generation customer interactions and chatbots online at https://e-bot7.com/

[1] See “European Overview” in PCM’s Digital and Card Payment Yearbooks 2021-2022: www.paymentyearbooks.com

[2] See “Reimagining customers engagement for the AI bank of the Digital Future”, McKinsey & Co.

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