Does conversational AI really improve customer experience in FinTech?
Fintech customer expectations are sky high and the entire industry is running circles to meet the demands.
78% of fintech customers expected personalized support whereas only 44% customers felt that the financial institutions delivered personalized customer service.
The gap between customer expectations and experience is clear. Over 75% banking executives weren’t confident in their ability to offer customer personalized customer support according to a survey.
So, how can financial institutions bridge the gap?
The new emerging technology, conversational AI platforms, seem to do the trick with statistics like:
74% customers prefer conversing with AI assistants for simple queries. Or, Fintech businesses saved around $7.3 billion in operational costs by implementing conversational AI chatbots.
So, conversational AI is a preferred medium and can save costs. But what are the real world effects of using conversational AI on customer satisfaction scores & NPS? Let’s take a look.
The real world impact of using conversational AI in fintech
Conversational AI can have a huge impact on customer experience across all the touchpoints. Let’s take a look at real world examples of conversational AI in the fintech buying journey and its impact on customer experience.
We’ll take a look at:
- Website Experience: Adding conversational AI assistant on your website to help your website visitors make the buying decision.
- Sales Experience: Using conversational AI sales assistants for improving buying experience.
- Product Experience: Using conversational AI assistant inside your help desk or your app to help customers solve their queries.
- Support Experience: Using conversational AI support assistants for your customer support agents.
Improving Website Experience with conversational AI
Implementing conversational AI on the website is a very common use case. Almost every other website has a chatbot on their website. These conversational AI assistants on fintech websites help users research about the products.
The main purpose of such a conversational AI is to reduce the time spent by users to find information & to qualify the visitors as leads. On an average, a website user visits 7+ pages to completely understand the product offerings. Fintech product suites are complex, which also leads to longer search cycles.
Conversational AI cuts the research time to minutes by providing a simple interface to find information. This helps customers gain a better understanding of the offering thus pushing them from visitor to lead status.
Case in Point : Leading Asian Bank uses website AI assistants sees 10%+ improvement in leads within 1 month
Our client is a Singaporean multinational bank with over $10 billion in revenue and over 12 million banking and credit card users. The bank wanted to improve the website experience on the credit card portal. An average user took over 15-20 minutes to get information about different credit cards.
With Alltius’ AI assistant, it was possible for users to draw information from more than 3,000 product collateral pages from their public web documentation in seconds. This reduced the time to access relevant information from 15-20 minutes to <1 minute.
Customer Experience impact: Due to the drastic reduction in time to information, the bank saw more than 10%+ increase in conversions.
Improving Sales Experience with conversational AI
The next step in the buying journey is interacting with sales agents. So, in this step, your prospect is ready to evaluate your offerings and needs more information. Over the sales call, the prospects will grill the sales agents about the product, the benefits, comparison against competitors and finding the best plans out of the entire product suite that suits them well.
In fintech, one product fits all doesn’t work. Every customer has diverse needs, which calls for differences in selling pitches and techniques.
When sales teams use AI sales assistants, they help the customer have a better sales experience with:
- Perfect recommendations of products that actually meet customer needs.
- Tailored pitches that are based on customer requirements
- On call objection handling with ready answers for all customer queries.
This reduces customer wait times thus having a positive effect on customer purchase probability and experience.
Case in Point: Assurance IQ increases conversion rates by 15% with AI sales assistants
Assurance IQ provides personalized guidance and makes finding and using medicare, health, life, motor and home insurances for 17 m+ of North Americans each year. They receive 100k+ leads which are given to 1000+ insurance agents who assist them over call to make informed decisions.
With over 6,000 insurance plans to be familiar with, agents face uphill tasks in staying updated on plan details and specific terms and conditions that change every year.
Next comes the shortage of time and the multitasking involved. Agents need to efficiently engage with callers in under 30 minutes. They need to understand their needs, select preferred plans from the options and explain why a particular plan is recommended. They need to highlight its benefits that align with the customer's needs, and ultimately close the sale convincingly. Delaying a decision often results in lost sales opportunities.
With AI sales assistants, the insurance agents were able to focus more time on listening to customers with empathy and fully comprehending their needs rather than searching for plans. The agents were able to complete all tasks well within 30 minutes while providing extra time to buyers to develop relationships.
Customer Experience impact: Making sales calls more personal and relevant led to 15% increase in conversations & improvement in buying experience.
Improving Product Experience with conversational AI
Now, you’ve converted the website visitor to a customer. The customer is using your product and runs into some issues. The first step the customer will take is to check out the help page or self-serve AI options as shown by stats.
69% of customers want to resolve as many issues as possible on their own, without needing to contact a support agent. This shows a high preference for self-service options.
Conversational AI can make a huge difference here. You can train & implement conversational AI assistant on your company's help documents, tutorials, product documentation and more inside your customer facing application. This will give your customers 3 ways to access help.
- Going through the help articles
- Chatting with the self serve AI assistant
- Calling customer support.
And if you ensure that the conversational AI provides accurate answers, you’ll see a reduction in the number of queries to your customer support & increase in customer satisfaction.
Case in Point: AngelOne uses self-serve AI assistant for 65% ticket deflection
AngelOne is a listed stock and mutual funds brokerage house in India with 18 million users & average daily turnover of almost $400 billion.
With over 1,000 support agents, the contact center now handles more than 500,000 tickets per month which led to high wait times. The users had to wait 30 minutes to a few hours to receive assistance & led to bad customer experiences. AngelOne used Alltius’ self-serve AI assistants to deflect at least 20% tickets. Additionally, they wanted to decrease the median customer query resolution time from 2-4 hours to just a few minutes.
Alltius’ AI assistant was trained over 20,000+ multilingual web pages, user account APIs, canned responses, Google Drive documents & other documents. In just a few months, Alltius has already powered over 1 million conversations and recorded over 100,000 sessions per week. It especially helped the company manage peak capacity up to 10 times the median hourly conversation volume during critical events such as market opening hours, IPOs, and buybacks. Thus, reducing adverse customer experience.
Customer Experience Impact: Median wait time for resolving issues is now slashed to a few seconds from a few hours earlier with self serve options. This led to an increase in NPS scores.
Improving Support Experience with conversational AI
No one likes waiting. Especially, when they’re facing an issue and need a solution.
And wait time’s effect on NPS are drastic. If the wait time becomes >10 minutes, it can adversely affect NPS by 24 points!
But in order to reduce customer wait times, you can either hire more customer support agents or you can make them efficient. Conversational AI can help customer support agents to close tickets at a faster rate with
- Pre-defined answers for frequently-asked questions.
- Immediate root-cause analysis of customer queries and finding correct answers from multiple insurance-related documentation.
- Canned responses for legal questions.
In this way, your customer support agent won’t spend a lot of time searching for answers but to actually build relationships with the customers. Let’s see an example.
Case in point: A leading digital lender slashes median customer support wait time from 4 hours to 5 minutes with conversational AI assistants.
The company is a Series D funded financial services platform that offers retail and business loans with over $1B annual disbursements, $40M in annualized profit target and over 7 million customers.
They receive over 10,000 tickets per day and customers have to wait an average of 4-5 hours for a satisfactory response. One major reason was time taken by support agents to draft email responses because of time required to search correct information.
They used Alltius’ AI support assistant trained on 20,000+ previous conversations, website content pages, user profile from CRM, product documentation and FAQs. The conversational AI assistant helped customer support agents speed up their response rates by understanding the customer intent in the email, performing root cause analysis, identifying the correct sources of information to solve the problem and drafting an email response. The support agents verified the information and sent it to the customer after personalizing it.
Customer Experience Impact: The customer wait times reduced from 4 hours to just 5 minutes, impacting customer experience positively & increasing customer loyalty.
Putting conversational AI in practice
While conversational AI is great in theory, how it is implemented plays a vital role in its effect on customer experience.
Reap the low hanging opportunities first. Identify the repetitive questions which could be easily answered by conversational AI. On top of that, find platforms like Alltius, which can handle complex 2-3 step queries easily. This leaves only the extremely complex queries for your customer support.
Second, clearly state the virtual agent's purpose upfront. Explaining the limitations of assistant upfront will prevent customer’s frustrations.
Third, start with pre-built industry-specific content to provide the virtual agent with robust knowledge from day one.
Fourth, identify and monitor key performance indicators like resolution time, automation rate, and customer satisfaction to continuously measure and improve the customer experience.
Read more: How to build a Gen AI plan in your organization?
Conclusion
Conversational AI can positively impact the fintech sector's CSAT and NPS by delivering heightened experiences. Fueled by enhanced customer interactions and real-time responses, it lowers service costs and boosts customer satisfaction across touchpoints.
Remember, integrating conversational AI into fintech operations isn't just about adopting the latest tech. It's about reshaping the way you interact with your customers, honing in on their preferences and providing seamless, personalized communication.
So, ponder on this - how can your firm step up its game by leveraging the power of conversational AI? Where can its potential shine brightest in your specific operations? Doing so could be the transformative decision that redefines your customer satisfaction scores and skyrockets your NPS.
Dive into your firm's approach to customer service; identify your opportunities, and get to work. Begin your explorations, test bold solutions, and let the power of conversational AI revolutionize your fintech business.
After all, a happier customer is a loyal customer. So, uncover the power of conversational AI for your fintech venture, and put your customers' satisfaction at the forefront.
Remember: "AI is not meant to replace us; it's destined to amplify us."
In case you’re looking to explore AI in fintech, try Alltius. Alltius is a platform created as a result of decades of research at Carnegie Mellon and Wharton. Alltius is a gen AI assistant platform that can 3X sales and slash support costs by 50% within weeks of implementation.
We’ve helped major banks reduce their customer support costs by $50k per month. In case you’re interested:
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