Introduction
More and more banking organizations are leveraging artificial intelligence to launch chatbot solutions, reducing costs and serving increasingly tech-savvy consumers. In many cases, chatbots are developed to facilitate two-way communication, replacing channels such as phone, email or text.
The objective is to provide quick service and transactional support 24/7 and remove or minimize barriers such as language, availability, higher costs etc.
What is Conversational Banking ?
It would be easy to consider conversational banking to simply be another self-service banking channel, with little to differentiate it from other channels that fall under the same category.
Conversational banking is highly unique and able to offer a number of significant benefits for banks over other channels, both assisted and self-service. To dismiss conversational banking would be to dismiss greater personalized services and an improved customer experience.
Conversational banking is a bi-directional interface between a customer and a bank, where a conversation can be initiated by either participant through a voice, text or visual interface.
While the responses given by the bank are machine generated, responses can be delegated to bank staff where necessary to gently handle more difficult or sensitive conversations.
Importance of Conversational AI
Conversational AI is of growing importance since it enables easy interaction interface between humans and computers. Due to its promising potential and alluring commercial values to serve as virtual assistants and/or social chatbots, major AI, NLP, and Search & Mining conferences are explicitly calling-out for contributions from conversational studies.
It is an active research area and of considerable interest.
Channels for Conversational Banking
Conversational banking can be delivered in several ways, including :-
- SMS text (and in the future RCS — Rich Communication Services)
- Chatbots
- Voice Assistants, for example Siri or Alexa
- Robots and Avatars
- ASL — Automated Sign Language (Visual recognition of sign language used by deaf people that is translated to text and vice versa)
Designing Chatbot Services in Banking
Most basic tasks such as balance inquiry, bank account details, loan queries etc. can be handled by a bot efficiently, allowing customer service representatives time for complex issues … leading to a more positive banking experience.
Here are some of the top questions :-
- Can I have a copy of my statement?
- I want to open a new account
- What is my credit card limit?
- I want to activate my new car loan
- I’d like to pay my bill
Real Life Chatbots in Banking
ENO
Eno, the chatbot of the Capital One bank is an intelligent assistant
The bot helps customers perform various tasks through simple text conversations
Here are a few of the actions that the chatbot can perform for its users:-
- Track account balances
- Check recent transactions
- See available credit
- Get bill due dates
- Pay Capital One credit cards
Erica
Erica is a chatbot app developed by Bank of America. Just as its competitor Eno, Erica can help customers perform various tasks through text commands :-
- Check routing numbers
- Transfer money between accounts
- Find past transactions
- Lock and unlock debit card
- Send money to friends
- Pay bills
This chatbot experience also looks to be a success. Indeed, the Bank of Innovation publication revealed that after just two months, the virtual assistant got past 1 Million users.
Wells Fargo’s Chatbot
Wells Fargo’s chatbot uses artificial intelligence and Facebook Messenger to respond to natural language messages from users, such as how much money they have in their accounts, and where the nearest bank ATM is.
This is a normal introduction path for banking organizations to follow since this is what most customers use chatbots for.
According to Wells Fargo, after a simple registration, customers can ask for their account balance, most recent transactions, how much they spent on food last week, and the location of the nearest ATM, among other things. Request by request, the information quickly appears.
Wells Fargo’s chatbot for Facebook Messenger is the company’s latest effort to engage and serve customers directly on social media — via desktop, smartphone, and other mobile devices — through an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot.
Conclusion
I am sure, many of you have faced long delays while waiting for a simple service when calling a call center; or visiting a branch/office. Most of those delays can be minimized with contextually aware, and intelligent chatbot solutions.Â
Use of chatbots is not limited to banking or finance sectors; these are now increasingly being employed for improving customer service, engaging customers, marketing and many other use cases.
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