Are chatbots the future of banking in India?

With consumer expectations increasing, the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and chatbots in banking is also increasing.

Technology implementation in banking has helped Indian banks cross many barriers, reach out to more people and all of this, while saving time. Customer service has occupied a major part of the technology overhaul with banks now looking at various ways to make it easy for the customers to reach out to them, often even while sitting at home.

Why Chatbots?

Poor service is one of the main reasons why banks lose customers. Long response times, a need to repeat the same information every time you call support, and lack of free operators do your bank no credit. If you don’t want to see customers leaving you, be sure to make customer service a priority; hence why chatbots have already begun to make their mark in the Indian banking industry.

Advantages of a Chatbox Services in Banking

Financial institutions must engage with their customers and members in the right way, and at the right place and time. A good integration of chatbots as part of the engagement process can provide consumers with quick and personalised interactions, using machine learning and artificial intelligence as a foundation.

Some of the main chatbox benefits for financial institutions include:

1) Big Savings

Chatbots are relatively inexpensive to develop and maintain compared to the human equivalent. Chatbots require less coding than standalone banking apps, can be supported by an expanding array of channels and don’t require expensive data storage thanks to chatbots’ cloud-based systems.
With the help of these AI based chatbots, you don’t have to make any extra investment on employing human resources and also allotting a designated place for them to work. In fact, if used wisely, chatbots can help you reduce your spending by approximately 30%.

2) Business Leads

Like any other service, banks need to continue acquiring new customers. If a prospect visits a bank’s website and is greeted with a polite ‘hello’, invited to ask questions about a product, and pointed in the right direction where they can find relevant information, the engagement is more likely to result in a new account opening.

3) Customer Support

With the introduction of chatbots, it is possible to provide the customers with a 24/7 support system. They can help you with the tasks like resolving customer queries and acknowledging them about your new products and services. With this, you can ensure better customer satisfaction, by resolving more questions in less time.  Plus, because a 24/7 instant chat feature is expected by the increasingly digital ‘always-on’ consumer, banks with chatbots built into their websites have a competitive advantage, and are likelier to attract and retain customers.

4) Employee Support

Not only bank customers can feel the benefits of a chatbot. Bank employees can benefit from them too. Intranet-based chatbot can help employees for better internal communication to gather insights from different branches and help the core management to take further innovative steps. (Such as using the technology to parse messages for employees, allow access to software systems, and handle basic IT requests like resetting passwords). Hence, it gives a win-win for both employees in gaining meaningful insights and banks in gaining productivity.

5) Automated Data Collection

Chat bots are excellent data analytics tools. Because they operate by serving customers with answers based on specific needs and keywords, they can give a bird’s-eye view of the customers’ current needs and biggest pain points. For example, by looking at a chatbot’s unanswered questions and the words utilized by the clients, developers can create new triggers and assign existing answers to develop the chatbot’s capabilities.

Automating most common bank-related tasks would allow customers to get a quicker answer to frequent questions. It would also gather valuable information, which can then feed into a central database to produce real-time, insightful and actionable reports on which executives can act to improve services and customer satisfaction.