How to improve customer service in the banking industry? With the use of AI. Virtual assistants can boost the productivity of your customer service agents significantly, while AI chatbots enable you to provide customer support 24/7. What’s more, with artificial intelligence, you can create tailored product offers based on customer data and give your clients more self-service options, including digital onboarding. In this article, we will look at this in more detail. We encourage you to read on.
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How to Leverage AI in Banking Customer Service
There are many ways to use AI in banking, but customer service is one of the areas that can benefit from artificial intelligence the most. Here, this technology can help both your employees and customers, hence enabling you to achieve higher productivity and customer satisfaction at once.
How to improve customer service in banking with AI? Let’s take a look at several examples.
Virtual Assistants
The first example that we have to mention are virtual assistants – an AI woven into your customer service systems that improves the way your agents interact with the clients via chat. As a part of our customer engagement platform, this solution comes with several functionalities that your financial institution can benefit from.
- Intelligent product proposals – Firstly, a virtual assistant is capable of processing all the data related to a particular client in a matter of seconds. Based on this, it can come up with products that meet the client’s needs. These can then be offered to the customer by the CS agent.
- The tone of message adjustment – Artificial intelligence may also be used to quickly paraphrase the messages sent by your customer service agents to the clients. This way, it’s possible to quickly adjust the tone of voice used by your agents to the expectations of your customers, making them feel more comfortable with their interaction.
- Answer generation – While a virtual assistant will not replace a customer service agent, they can help them respond to the tickets. In this case, AI can provide your agents with written responses to clients’ questions based on your internal documentation (with links to particular documents). The role of the customer service agent is then reduced – they only need to verify the information and can process the query more efficiently.
What are the results of using a virtual assistant? Your customer service is faster and you can deliver more personalized experiences to each customer, hence increasing their satisfaction.
Omni- and Opti-Channel Customer Service via Intelligent Data Integration
To provide omni- and opti-channel customer service, you need to have all your customer data integrated into one system. Doing so manually might be a timely process. Therefore, AI is here to help.
In this particular use case of AI in banking customer service, the artificial intelligence model works as an accelerator for the intelligent data integration process. It helps you merge different systems and data sources efficiently, which in turn enables you to provide truly omnichannel customer support – no matter where and how the client contacts your bank, your customer service agents will have all the information at their fingertips.
Self-Service
While embracing self-service is an excellent way to improve agent productivity, it can also enhance your customer service as a whole. After all, with self-service, your clients do not need to wait for a free agent and can complete particular processes whenever and wherever they need.
What are the self-service options available thanks to the use of AI? In our opinion, there are three::
- Automated digital onboarding – Ekyc in banking can be accelerated with two technologies: biometrics and AI. When used together, these enable you to automate the whole onboarding process, reducing the need for your potential customers to visit your physical branches to an absolute minimum. This way, the customers can start, stop, continue, and finish their onboarding whenever it is convenient for them, which boosts their overall experience.
- Intelligent bots – Another option is to use gen-AI-powered bots. These are mostly useful for simple queries, so they might not help you free a lot of time from your agents’ flow. However, such a solution has a major advantage for the clients – it makes customer service more accessible than ever. With intelligent chatbots in banking, you can provide a basic level of customer service 24/7, enabling clients to contact your bank when it is truly convenient for them.
- Automated Appointment– Finally, you can embrace self-service with an Appointment Manager – a system designed to make scheduling easier. From the customer’s perspective, it’s a widget available in-app or on-site that enables them to book a meeting with your employee at any time, whether offline or online. It’s much more convenient and efficient than the traditional methods.
Naturally, all self-service options mentioned above will work great when combined with human customer service. Nevertheless, implementing them will impact customer experience positively.
Hyper-Personalisation
Customers strive for hyper-personalization – no matter whether in banking, or any other industry. Nothing shall enable you to achieve such a level of personalisation as artificial intelligence.
AI can be leveraged to personalise all aspects of customer service. First, you can use it to categorise and label your customers’ transactions – you can read more about this in our use case of AI-powered transaction classification for a retail bank. Additionally, you can use artificial intelligence to analyse your customers’ behaviours. With all of that ready, you can start implementing personalisation – AI can help with this, too.
For example, you might design an intelligent UI in your mobile application. Such a solution involves AI adjusting the interface based on the user’s habits. For instance, if a particular client looks for investment opportunities at certain times of the day or week, artificial intelligence will recognise that and provide a shortcut in the main interface of the app, making it more convenient for the customer.
Another option to improve your banking customer service with AI is to offer automation, for example, for recurring transactions. An AI-based system may recognise such payments and provide the user with the possibility to send them automatically.
Finally, you can use AI to provide your clients with relevant content. For example, you might use artificial intelligence to recognise that your customer is interested in a mortgage and provide them with an article explaining how to get started.
Predictive Insights and Proactive Customer Service
Ultimately, you can use AI in banking to provide proactive customer service. What does it mean?
A proactive bank is an institution that tries to recognise the needs and problems of its customers before they occur. To achieve this, you need to leverage AI and its data processing capabilities. By analysing patterns in customer behaviour and comparing them with historical data, you can extract predictive insights that will help you comprehend what will help your customers in advance and provide them with adequate solutions. AI-based solutions that can support customer service is also AI Prompter.
Conclusions
How to improve customer service in banking with AI? You should start with AI for data analysis and use the gathered insights to integrate your data and personalise your services. Then, you should introduce virtual assistants. With them, you can kill two birds with one stone – increase the productivity of your customer service teams and enhance customer experience. Finally, you should adopt a proactive approach and provide your clients with solutions before they need them. With all of this in place, the effectiveness and efficiency of your customer service will see a significant rise.
You might also read: Customer data platform as an answer for new data-driven challenges?
