Conversational AI Optimizing The Customer Experience

Ganesh Gopalan Sep 17, 2020

In an unprecedented turn of events, businesses all over the world faced a significant challenge to manage their operations and stay afloat. Financial services being an essential sector had to make sure it is business as usual for all critical operations. The idea of work from home is not implicit to the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) industry.

The BFSI industry has survived many crises and the commonality among all these is that it has made the industry to come up with solutions that are stronger and resilient than the earlier ones.

The lockdown and restrictions on travel curtailed the customers' access leading them to contact support centers to get their queries sorted more than ever. The outburst of calls to Contact Centers and minimal access to the agents had limited staff overwhelmed with the increasing workload. Customers starting to explore the online self-service methods to manage their finances have forced these companies to offer an omnipresent interface. Although the self-service methods were gaining traction even during the pre COVID times, the current scenario has further accelerated the process of embracing the new methods of customer service. The ongoing crisis is no different and has caused financial organizations to review the strategies towards technology enablers. Conversational AI is one of them and plays a crucial role in automating manual steps. Conversational bots have come a long way in adding value to the BFSI business, from ensuring superior customer service, scalability, efficiency and consistent customer service, to uplifting brand perception. Here are some of the benefits that a conversational AI entails.

Conversational AI can help financial organizations bring in much-needed relief from the challenges that the BFSI sector might face as an aftermath of the crisis. The uniqueness of this solution lies in the fact that the conversational bots provide the required human touch to the man-machine interactions and parallelly provides the comfort of not having spoken to a monotonous system like the IVR. With advanced cognitive abilities, Conversational AI provides more than very simple rule-based automation, from answering FAQs to resolving issues.

The customer support space is another major area where the Conversational AI can make a significant contribution. With the COVID induced lockdowns restricting the efficiency of support executives, customer support has been hit the hardest. A huge surge in the volume of inbound calls and other touchpoints like branches functioning below capacity can hinder the experience of the customer. Conversational AI can be deployed to handle a major portion of this traffic, like handling routine queries while executives can take up queries that require their intervention. Using Conversational AI to augment existing support ensures that all the customers are paid heed to, finally leading to high customer satisfaction levels.

Also, deploying a Conversational AI on mobile or web applications can ensure a smooth transition from offline to the online model. Services like form downloads, analyzing a loan request, checking account balance, and among others can be automated by a Virtual Assistant. Users who have never engaged in the online mediums can navigate on the digital applications in their preferred language. This ensures an unparalleled CX for the customers.

One of the major advantages a Conversational AI enabled Virtual Assistant entails is the ability to speak multiple languages. Having an agent to do this is tedious and poses a major hiring challenge as well. A Virtual Assistant trained to speak English and vernacular can easily switch between languages according to the customers' preferences. The multilingual ability of the voice and chat bots lets the customer communicate their needs as they would if they were to do so physically. This not only gives the customer a more personalized experience but also enhances the brand value.

The ongoing crisis has made the consumers and the businesses move to virtual operating models for availing all the services. This has resulted in more and more customers engaging with the companies on digital platforms exponentially. The behavioral transformation has jolted the customer service space like never before. Customers are now asking for assistance on social platforms just like the traditional ones. Hence, it is of utmost importance to engage and resolve queries whenever the customers are asking for. Omnichannel bots can automate all the major social platforms and engage with them round the clock. With customers expecting quick turnaround times, platform-agnostic bots are the need of the hour.