Transform your digital banking experience: How Conversational AI is bringing the in-branch banking experience to your fingertips
As financial institutions continue to embrace digital transformation, many are turning to conversational banking as a way to offer 24/7 member and customer service and support. In a world where convenience is key, it’s essential for banks and credit unions to provide an omnichannel customer and member experience that can match or even exceed the traditional in-person experience. Enter conversational banking.
Authentic “Human-like” Voices
Having a “human-like” voice for intelligent virtual assistance is crucial in creating an engaging and natural telephony user experience. A voice that mimics the tonality and inflection of a human speaker can help establish trust and rapport with members and customers, making them more likely to use the conversational banking solution on a regular basis. This, in turn, leads to greater user adoption and satisfaction and increased productivity for the contact center. A human-like voice can also make the technology feel less like a machine and more like an agent, which can help people feel heard and understood.
Accurate Natural Language Understanding
In-person interactions involve a lot of back-and-forth dialogue, with both parties able to understand each other’s words and intentions. This makes natural language processing (NLP) a crucial aspect of conversational banking as it enables the technology to comprehend and respond to requests in a human-like manner. With NLP, virtual assistants can understand and process the context and intent behind member and customer inquiries and provide accurate and relevant responses. NLP allows members and customers to use colloquial language to interact with the virtual assistant and execute requests as if they are in a branch, making it more intuitive and user-friendly.
On top of that, natural language processing is also critical for advanced sentiment analysis, which can help virtual assistants to better understand emotions and provide more personalized responses when members and customers express anger or frustration.
Relevant Contextual Awareness
In-person interactions are often rich in context, with both parties able to pick up on verbal and nonverbal cues that help them better understand each other. To recreate this experience through digital channels, it’s important for credit unions and banks to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to enable their systems to understand and respond to context.
Contextual awareness is a must-needed feature for conversational banking solutions as it improves intelligent virtual assistants’ overall accuracy and efficiency. With the ability to understand and process contextual information, virtual assistants can provide more precise and relevant responses, reducing the need for manual intervention or corrections. This leads to increased efficiency, improved productivity, and reduced frustration for users who receive incorrect or irrelevant responses. Furthermore, contextual awareness allows for predictive recommendations and anticipatory capability, which can help intelligent virtual assistants proactively provide applicable services and information for the next step to members and customers.
Timely Agent Oversight
While conversational banking is designed to automate many banking tasks via various channels, it’s essential to have human oversight to handle complex and sensitive issues. Agent monitoring and intervention are the last boosts to ensure the system provides accurate and personalized responses, ensuring customers and members receive the correct answers to their questions and that their needs are met promptly. Agent monitoring also helps improve virtual assistants’ overall performance and accuracy, as agents can offer feedback and make necessary corrections, leading to continuous improvement and refinement of conversational banking technology. By providing human oversight and quality control, members and customers will have more trust and confidence in the virtual assistant.
Conversational banking has the potential to recreate the in-person experience and provide members and customers with the convenience and accessibility they desire. By focusing on these four key areas, banks, and credit unions can effectively recreate the in-person member and customer experience in the digital world. With an enhanced digital banking experience, financial institutions can now build trust and loyalty with members and customers and ensure a frictionless and personalized experience during every digital interaction.
A division of IMS, Inc. — a leader in transactional communications — Directlink has become a first-of-its-kind AI-powered conversational banking platform. Directlink has leveraged the knowledge gained over the past 35 years to help deliver digital transformation through the deployment and management of intelligent virtual assistants across new and traditional channels for financial institutions of all shapes and sizes.
Reference: Mulcahy, S. (n.d.). State of the Connected Customer. Salesforce. https://a.sfdcstatic.com/content/dam/www/ocms/assets/pdf/service-cloud/state-of-connected-customer.pdf
