Chatbots in Banking – Retain Customers & Streamline Operations

There’s a reason why banks and other financial institutions have increasingly started implementing chatbots to deliver their services. Bank of America, HDFC, American Express, Commonwealth Bank, HSBC (Hong Kong), PayPal, SBI, Lemonade, MasterCard are some of the major financial institutions which use chatbots for banking and financial services.

Chatbots are capable of holding personalized conversations with each of your customers round the clock. Chatbots in the banking sector can help banks ace their customer service and stand out in the competitive market. By catering to thousands of customers’ repetitive queries automatically, banks can save billions annually in the form of time spent on routine customer queries. Using interactive chatbots to cater to routine queries, your bank’s services become more accessible to your customers, thereby leading to a loyal customer base for your financial institution.

According to a report by Juniper Research, businesses and consumers can save over 2.5 billion customer service hours by the year 2023 using chatbots. Using chatbots will result in the savings of a whopping USD 11 billion annually for banking, retail and healthcare sectors.

Let us have a look at the popular use cases for chatbot in banking and financial services-

Customer Support

The standard for a new era of customer service has been set across all industries and the banking sector is no exemption. Customers have grown accustomed to fast and personalized service, and they expect the same from their financial services provider, i.e. you.

Chatbots come to the rescue by providing 24*7 customer service. Chatbots replace long wait times with instant response that helps make your customers’ journeys friction-less and pleasant. A chatbot answers the frequently asked questions and an NLP-based chatbot can also be trained to interpret and respond to custom inputs by the customer. Right from educating your customers to assisting them make the right financial decisions, chatbots can provide instant customer support, at a fraction of the cost. In case the bot is unable to answer a specific complex query, it can also re-route requests to a human representative.

Lead Generation

Chatbots can open a new path when it comes to lead generation for banking. Banking chatbots engage with the incoming traffic on the bank’s website, ask them relevant questions, converse with them and generate leads.

A chatbot can also be deployed on multiple channels like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and more to increase engagement and brand awareness. The leads gathered from various channels can then be taken up by the sales team for follow-up. The chatbot can also capture leads and share insights with the sales team, thereby allowing them to move directly to the second stage of the discussion with interested prospects.

Loan/Investment Planner

With seamless integrations to internal systems, chatbots in banking can simplify the process of loan or investment application. Calculating monthly payments, keeping a track of investments, interest rates, etc, often turn out to be harrowing experience for your customers. Having a chatbot which they can approach at any point of time, even outside banking hours acts as a much-needed relief.

The banking chatbot can provide essential information like interest rates, costing, tenure, documents required, etc. and guide them through the processes step by step. Also, based on the customer’s profile and other details, chatbots in banking can provide personalized recommendations and reports. A chatbot interacting with your customers to walk them through loan/investment applications can completely change the way people approach the banking process, turning it into a positive experience.

Creating Support Tickets

A chatbot can help reduce confusion by simplifying complex banking terms into more straightforward language and walking customers through simple steps. Chatbots can also create support tickets for the customers to help them solve the problem they are facing. The bot can create a support ticket and acknowledge the customer with the ticket number and the estimated time of arrival for an engineer to get back to them.

For tickets that have already been created, customers can go to the bot and enter their ticket number, and the bot can fetch the latest status details of the ticket from the internal system and keep them updated.

Feedback Collection

With the ongoing endeavor to improve customer satisfaction across banking, it is important to get feedback from the customers themselves on ways how they would like to be served better. Uninteresting long feedback forms usually end up in the trash can or the trash folder.

But with chatbots, the process of feedback collection becomes conversational and interactive, which encourages the users to give honest feedback. Giving feedback through conversation makes the process more enjoyable for the user and increases the chances that the user will take the time to provide you with the information you need to improve your services.

Customer service has evolved by leaps and bounds. With the customer at the center of all marketing and sales campaigns across industries now, it has become imperative for the banking sector to step up their customer service as well.

Chatbots come with multi-faceted benefits for businesses across verticals. Efficient customer support is the most tangible of these benefits. Chatbots in banking provide instant response round the clock, which make your banking services more accessible to the customers.

It is important to note that banking chatbots will not replace customer service agents but will enable them to focus on complex issues, while chatbots address the simple queries instantly.

It isn’t as easy as it seems to create a truly beneficial chatbot. It is important to design the chatbot such that it provides value to both the business and its customers. We, at WotNot, understand this and have worked with businesses across verticals to develop valuable and scalable chatbots that work as personal assistants and provide seamless experience to the customers.