Bots: What’s in it for banks?

The growing interest of banks in the BOTS technology from a customer viewpoint can be largely explained by evolving preferences. Today’s digital users are well connected and have tons of information but what they want is timely, useful and non-intrusive advice and analysis.
Organizations have been chanting the automation, personalization, and digitization mantra for a while now and chat bots clearly fit that story. Used effectively, they can bring significant cross/up-sell opportunities and cost benefits.
Automation, AI, customer experience are the buzz words that banks live by today. BOTs provide banks a happy confluence of the three – enabling automation of tasks through AI, while providing exceptional customer experience.
Here are some of the reasons banks need to look at BOTs –

• Engage customers and prospects
  Today’s customers prefer chatting over speaking to a human executive, and emoji’s over words. They want to communicate on their own terms and at a time of their choice. Banks can take a cue from these pointers and start engaging customers through chat. A more engaged customer will mean more business. Several banks have now understood that they have to meet the customer where the customer spends most time, in place of expecting customers to open banking apps to do their banking. We are noticing a slew of banks launching chat bots on Facebook messenger and Twitter. Examples include MasterCard and Yes Bank. With chatbots], banks ca given a contextual customer experience that makes banking frictionless. A good example for this is DBS which has introduced a chatbot based on Facebook messenger.
• End to end value chain access
  Customers want to know more than their account balance; for instance, they may like to know how much more they can spend without overstressing their budget. To this end, a bot can play a role of an aggregator to serve as a one stop shop for all customer queries. For example, such an aggregator bot can in turn call the expense manager bot and so on. Overall, the bank profits from automation and customer centricity brought in by this.
• Automation tool
  Bots, being able to take actions on behalf of customers and their employees, are of significant interest to banks. To enable this, chat commands from users are tied at the back-end to trigger specific actions. An example of this is that a chat request for stopping paper statements should trigger the relevant instruction to the reporting system. This should then be followed up by relevant questions based on the availability of customer information for electronic statement delivery.
  Additionally, BOTs can help banks in automating their internal processes. JP Morgan uses a Bot to streamline its back office operations, which helps in handling common IT questions like resetting passwords.
  BOTs deployed internally to help bank staff with faster and better connectivity with other important functions such as Finance, HR and administration. It also provides better access to the bank’s existing knowledge base.

Bots have the capability to connect the dots and enable the banks to expand their ecosystem and provide a truly meaningful and profitable digital experience. Hence, we recommend that banks should start their journey with BOTs by identifying a good a business use case where they can provide the differentiation.