Many banks and financial companies face the same problems from year to year and can’t solve them because of their complexity. By financial companies, we also mean non-traditional banking institutes that work in the areas like Forex, trading platforms, cryptocurrencies, binary options and so on.
According to Digitalist Magazine most common problems are:
- Competition from fintech companies is increasing
- Pressure by regulators
- Consumer expectations are still low
We don’t call for solving all the financial problems with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and chatbots. But chatbots can help modern business to boost engagement and improve customer service in financial industries. Finally, if we link chatbots integration with other activities we can make customer expectations come true and overcome competitors with customer service levels.
4 FINANCIAL BENEFITS OF CHATBOTS
Chatbot integration could bring dozens of benefits to your financial business. Top-5 most valuable of them are:
1. CHATBOTS REDUCE THE LOAD ON THE FRONTLINE
The main and the most known chatbot advantage is business process automation. If you have a chatbot on the frontline of your financial business, you usually forget about the most common questions and avoid standard situations. There is no need to point the problem to the manager if it can be solved by the chatbot.
The main custom chatbot integration benefit – you decrease load to your frontline support service. Most companies use live chats right now, and to be honest – it is the great solution, but in fact, your clients may use several messengers, a website or even email. Controlling so many communication channels is a mess and not an easy task.
For example, a client wants to know the information about the stock quotes and can’t find the information on site. At this moment, most likely he’d bounce your site or ask for help in the live chat. If he asks for the help the manager would waste their time and respond to that question. More questions require more managers to answer them (no one wants to lose clients, right? ;).
On top of that, an NLP-featured chatbot would respond faster than an operator, who would search for the information in a database.
2. CHATBOTS SERVE 24 / 7 / 365
Wouldn’t it be nice to make your business work 24/7?
The best way to do so is to integrate a chatbot into your lead capture processes.
Moreover, a great burden would be taken off from the sales managers’ shoulders. Instead, they would have useful information on your current clients and prospects.
3. ENHANCE ANALYTICS & BOOST CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
Chatbots for financial services can be easily integrated both with internal and external analytics systems.
External analytics systems (ex. Google Analytics) provide huge loads of information on a user in real-time: their country, county, city, district, client’s time, operating system, browser version, estimated age.
Such data creates a better understanding of the client in front of us. And with this understanding, a company is able to come up with a more suiting, personalized offer. In that simple way, chatbots help financial companies engage customers much more effectively.
4. CHATBOTS ARE A CHEAPER SOLUTION IN THE LONG RUN
Yes, as a one-time payment chatbot integration may seem very expensive. But in the long-term, it turns out to overcompensate for its initial costs.
Also, there are high chances of job reductions in your sales department – we save the money again.
The remaining managers would be less loaded.
As a result, all that chatbots in banking greatly improves customer service at financial companies. It is well known that the smoother customer service is the better clients will think and speak about your company. And as you know, customer relationships today in our highly competitive world is more important than ever before.
WHY DO FINANCIAL COMPANIES NEED CUSTOM CHATBOT
Now, having a website is not enough. People want to be sure they can get useful and well-timed information from any possible channel of communication. Some people prefer to email, others would immediately pick up a phone to make a deal. More communication channels you support – more leads would reach out to your business – more clients you have. That’s simple.
Now let’s refer to the statistics.
71% of consumers expect a company to offer a self service (according to HubSpot). People want to solve issues on their own.
To live up to their expectations, organizations introduce self-service customer portals. The most forward-looking ones have already put chatbots in place. A poll by LivePerson depicts the current situation of people’s attitude towards the technology:
We can conclude that companies need to start working on their self service strategies. In 2-3 year, as more people will have a chance to interact with this technology, chatbots will become a necessity.
FEATURES OF A MODERN CHATBOT
Unfortunately, the majority of modern chatbot platforms are made to make money first, but not to offer the high-quality service at a decent price. In this or that way, every platform has an awful lot of different limitations: from branding possibilities to the number of simultaneous conversations. Some charge for not useful extra features, just to show “the real value” of their platform.
Below we offer a list of really essential requirements made by the modern financial companies.
Main Requirements:
- Have pretty GUI (Graphical User Interface)
- Serve clients on site, via e-mail and messengers
- Be intelligent enough to process complex queries
- Process nature language accurately and in real-time
- Connect a human operator into the conversation on demand
- Be easy scalable
Additional features:
- GUI for human operator
- API
- Integration to CRM/ ERP/ BPM software
READY-MADE CHATBOTS OR CUSTOM DEVELOPED?
That is among the first questions that stroke when thinking over getting a chatbot solution.
Should one build it on a platform or hire a team of developers that would create one?
Let us share our experience.
Though, there are a few cases when developing on platform can be a reasonable option, most often, it’s not.
And all the chatbot-building platforms have limitations in this or that way. Many face the limitations of platforms: they couldn’t add some essential features, couldn’t evolve their chatbots, were unable to integrate it with their CRM.
Some of our customers turned to us in critical moments.
One of them was suffering from monetary losses, because platform servers went occasionally down.
When the client decided to solve the problem by moving the chatbot to his own server, he realized that was not possible! It was a solid solution integrated with the platform, which can’t be moved.
To avoid such situations one should think thoroughly in advance, and consult the experts. Just paying an extra ~10%, you would forget about all that complexities of chatbot development on a platform. Doesn’t that sound reasonable?
Learn more about all platform issues: https://azati.ai/why-you-shouldnt-build-a-chatbot-on-platform/
PRECAUTION
When building a chatbot, there are many factors that developers be take into consideration and tricky moments that should be addressed.
The problem is not the technologies used, not the customers’ expectations. The key problem is the lack of really highly qualified developers, that not only create and teach neural networks but also integrate it with the client’s business processes.
If we look at the top of Google search results on a query: “top chatbot developers”, we would see a list of platforms and one paid article about companies you haven’t even heard about. Why is it so? Firstly, some companies prefer to have paid for being mentioned in the article. Secondly, all those companies are likely a group of individuals and haven’t done anything more complicated than a simple mapping chatbot. This market is a mess right now.
Can that company or individuals develop a solid and complex solution, then integrate it with your current business processing with an affordable fixed price? Most likely not.
We hope you will find a reliable software development partner that would help you avoid all the complexities and difficulties. To learn more about our experience concerned to intelligent chatbots – check it out: https://azati.ai/services/product-engineering/conversational-ai-platform/
