How Voice Bot Can Empower Your Bank — Use Cases and the Future
Customers demand faster, effortless ways to engage with banks that save them time and frustration. Web and mobile apps make it easy for customers to self-serve. However, call volumes remain high as customers choose phones as the channel for escalating unresolved issues, which significantly increases the contact center costs. Voice bot can conduct natural and intelligent conversations on behalf of the banking contact center agents with millions of customers, at minimal operational costs.
How Voice Bots Empower Banking Industry
Most banking contact centers engage customers through standard IVR systems. Callers are dragged through a series of prompts where they answer specific questions to advance down a maze of lengthy menus to get to the right option. Moreover, IVRs are not handling any queries; they are simply acting as a traffic guide to categorize customer issues and route them to a live agent. According to the 2018 CFI Contact Center Satisfaction Index, 88% of users who reach an IVR end up speaking to a live agent to resolve their issue. And while contact centers have scaled the number of calls they can attend to, they are still limited by the availability of live agents. Customers are likely to be left on hold forever during peak volume spikes or possibly get lost in the IVR mazes. Thus, the valuable opportunity for banks to capitalize on has resulted in frustrating experiences for customers.
Voice bots take IVRs to the next level by enabling customers to speak with the system similarly to how they might interact with a live customer support agent. Using technologies like speech recognition, NLU, and machine learning, callers get freedom for more rapid self‑service and successfully resolve issues within the IVR, with only very complex issues being ushered to a human agent. Not only does this maximize employee efficiency and reduce operational costs, but it also enhances the customer experience by reducing delays of more than 5 minutes. Let’s discuss in detail the ways in which voice bots empower banks.
Exceptional autonomous self-service experience
On a global average, 66% of customers prefer self-service over engaging with a contact center representative. However, customers expect the self-service experience to be flawless and effortless, which is a miss in the current scenarios as 44% of customers call the contact center after they fail to find resolutions on their own. Most banking contact centers engage customers through standard IVR systems. Callers are dragged through a series of prompts where they punch buttons to advance down a maze of lengthy menus to get to the right option. In 88% of the cases, IVRs are not able to handle the queries and route them to a live agent.
Conversational IVRs, or voice bots, provide an intuitive self-service channel for customer inquiries, facilitating human-like interactions and delivering a better experience than the age-old FAQs and the dreaded IVR. Callers can directly state the query they would like to get addressed and successfully resolve the issue within the IVR. This has reduced customer wait time by 92% and increased first call resolution by 80%.
Enhanced customer service experience 24/7
Banks are implementing voice bots to empower customers to engage in the way that they want and connect on their own terms. Voice bots enable 24/7 access to banking services from any location at any timezone. Availability, accessibility, and rapid responsiveness have made voice bots a popular banking interface.
Reduction in operational costs and improvement in employee efficiency
Having a voice bot is like a force multiplier. Since the assistant can respond to questions and resolve many of the inquiries that customers have, this lightens the call center’s workload. Businesses onboard fewer call service team members on staff, and those present are freed up to meet higher-value customer needs. This improves employee efficiency and productivity considerably.
Getting by in a crisis like COVID19
A pandemic like the Covid19 has radically changed how banks operate and service their customers. With limited in-branch banking services, phone support has become the primary customer touchpoint, and the call volumes are at a record high. Banks that relied on offshoring solutions for their contact center support find it hard to manage the remote work requirements and rapid scaling necessitated by the COVID-19 outbreak.
AI-powered voice bots empower banks to overcome such crises. Voice bots enable banks to power autonomous telephonic conversations at scale and offer instant, on-demand customer service. They can be monitored from anywhere and do not require physical space for deployment.
Personalized Offerings
Voice bots drive customer engagement by making accurate and useful recommendations to customers in real-time. AI analyzes large volumes of data and provides personalized banking offers based on customer profiles.
Banking Use Cases for Voice Bot Implementation across Customer Journey
As per the Capgemini Research Institute survey 2019, customer preference in the banking sector is largely shifting toward voice in the coming years. Today, chat dominates, as most financial services organizations have chat assistants as their predominant customer offering. However, there will be a marked shift toward the voice in the next three years. It could be applied to every aspect of the customer experience, from acquisition to engagement to retention.
While every interaction matters throughout the customer lifecycle, it is not practical to transform all of them at once. Therefore, it’s better to create a roadmap and then begin prioritizing and optimizing one use case at a time. Here are some top priority banking use cases where customer experience could be enhanced by implementing voice bots.
Customers can learn about banking products and services and be assisted in product selection based on their needs at any time of the day. Voicebots enables customers to autonomously self-serve for simple account management queries and tasks, saving both their and agents’ time. In crisis situations like misplaced and stolen cards, customers can instantly block their cards by interacting with contact center bots, without spending time navigating through complex IVR menus or hindrance due to off-duty hour handling. Voice bots power customers to perform complex tasks like credit card balance transfers with ease. They need to provide relevant information like name, payment address, and account number.
The Future of Voice Bots in Banking
Banking and other financial services are leading the way in the adoption of Voice AI technology. Leading banks are rolling out authentication features using AI-based voice recognition that can automatically confirm the identity of a customer when they call into customer service. Integrating this with voice bot, banks can drive frictionless customer interaction and provide a seamless voice-led experience, when using financial services. As per the Juniper Research study, the success rate of bot interactions in the financial sector is expected to reach 90% by 2022.
With infinite banking services to choose from, exceptional customer experience is the only factor that can make banking and financial organizations stand out amidst competitors. Therefore, banks are focusing more and more on the voice bot experience to enable customers find a quick resolution to their service requests through a quick conversation on the phone.
Final Thoughts
Agara’s voice bots provide self-service for routine financial queries and customer tasks in a natural conversational manner. They are pre-trained to understand banking vocabulary and can track multiple intents while engaging in complex, multi-turn conversations. They come with ready-to-implement, pre-configured use cases and are architected to achieve high accuracy.
