Chatbots in Financial Services. The customer experience is fundamental to success if you’re running a business. However, it can be hard to make your business stand out if you’re against a competitor who offers virtually the same products, price points, and expert knowledge.

Providing an excellent customer experience is one guaranteed way of standing clear of the crowd. A positive customer experience ensures that clients return to your service, resulting in a loyal client base and a good chance of positive referrals. In addition, a customer experience that excels leads to business growth, happy customers, and an edge over the competition.

An effective way of providing such an enhanced customer experience is via chatbots in the financial sector. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has seen a surge in people forced into managing their finances at home, opening up the financial services market.

Chatbots are just one way of providing an enhanced customer experience in the financial sector, but a very effective one. This article will demonstrate the benefits of chatbots in financial services, leading to the continued growth of your business as a whole.

1. Round-the-Clock Customer Service

Money problems and financial issues don’t follow the 9-5 working days of the financial sector. People need to make payments round the clock and may have questions that require answers beyond business hours.

Unless your business can afford to employ staff 24/7, having someone on the phone at 3 am isn’t practical. This is where chatbot financial services come in.

Chatbots are ready and waiting to respond to customer queries around the clock. Many banks worldwide now use a chatbot service. From 4% of banks in 2020, the percentage of banks with chatbots has risen to 13% in 2021.

No matter where you are worldwide, a chatbot can provide you with a 24/7 service that is incredibly helpful for serving different time zones.

For example, AIG Insurance and finance introduced a chatbot named “Poly”, powered by the Commbox omnichannel platform, to help out its understaffed customer service team and plans to have it as their leading point of customer contact.

The scope of AI allows specific chatbots to learn and improve over time, enhancing the overall customer experience. As a result, customer waiting times go down, problems are solved with very little human intervention, and satisfaction levels improve. It’s a win-win scenario for your business.

Chatbots can boost customer service for any business, not just financial ones. In addition, they have been proven to be an excellent customer retention method thanks to their ease of use and instant response times.

2. In-depth Customer Information

Chatbots can now offer customers a swathe of options and solve issues that wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago.

Chatbot financial services get smarter via machine learning. This notion theoretically results in less maintenance from your business’ perspective and more in terms of what they can offer customers in terms of information. This process also allows them to take on more in-depth client information.

Consider including questionnaires on your business’ website that customers can fill in and give you access to more in-depth client information. You can then use this data to make your chatbot more intelligent, giving you access to your client’s financial habits. Use your chatbot service to build your stores of information on clients to fine-tune your customer experience in the future.

3. Financial Services Tailored to Customer Needs

The cleverer a chatbot in financial services becomes, the more personalized their service becomes. This level of personalization extends to several facets of what constitutes a good customer experience.

For example, customers can select a specific language they want to interact with a chatbot in – imagine how much more difficult this process is with a human advisor over the phone. This feature deepens the client connection with the bank, solidifying excellent customer experience and brand loyalty.

When banks first used chatbots for financial services, they could only answer common FAQs. However, Erica, the chatbot used by Bank of America, was launched in 2018. Since then, more than 200,000 different ways for customers to ask financial questions have been integrated into Erica’s software.

As well as dealing with the basic tasks (viewing balances, making payments, and others), Erica can provide personalized, proactive guidance to customers based on their unique situations. She can help BoA customers to manage their finances easier, optimize budgeting and cash flow and identify opportunities to help their savings grow.

This level of tailored servicing demonstrates chatbots’ value to the financial services sector.

Customers who experience such levels of personalization appreciate the help the chatbot provides, thereby improving the overall customer experience and further cementing brand loyalty.

4. Automated Back-Office Tasks

Access to either a human advisor or an automatic chatbot to answer your questions is only one part of the overall customer experience in the financial services industry. The other part is working on the tasks each customer needs, whether taking out a loan, changing accounts, or ensuring that payment is canceled.

This is where chatbots genuinely come into their own. According to ‘Complaints Number’, one of the most common complaints about any bank is its customer service experience. So any area in which chatbots can improve will add value to your business.

Therefore, a chatbot that can reduce the time spent completing tedious back-office administrative tasks will improve the customer experience. JPMorgan Chase’s COIN (Contract Intelligence) solution uses sophisticated machine learning to cut down massively on the hours spent on these admin tasks.

Before COIN, the bank spent around 360,000 person-hours a year on mundane tasks, including processing loan agreements. Then, COIN came in and did the same job in seconds. Cutting down the time and money spent on studies that chatbots and AI can resolve in a fraction of the time, clearly demonstrating astronomical benefits to any business in the financial services sector.

5. Boost Your Sales Conversions

While chatbots improve the customer experience for your financial services business, they also increase sales and conversion rates. Business leaders also claim that chatbots increase sales by an average of 67%.

Think of a chatbot as a virtual sales assistant or customer advisor who greets you at your local bank branch door. Chatbots fill that same niche, only on your business’s website rather than your brick-and-mortar store. They do the same thing for eCommerce stores in the retail sector.

In any sector, not just the financial services sector, chatbots can help you upsell and increase sales.

A chatbot can guide a customer through the purchase process. It also does not make customers feel as pressured into a deal as human agents do. As a result, conversion rates go up without sacrificing the overall customer experience.

When chatbots take the lead whenever a customer visits your website, they can direct that customer through a sales funnel and point them (signpost) in the direction you want them to. In addition, Chatbots can make customers aware of special offers and discounts that they might not have otherwise stumbled across in real-time, leading to rapid conversions.

Users who are already on your website will be high-intent users, and therefore more likely to convert or be interested in the deals your chatbot may offer them.

This feature highlights another valuable insight that chatbots can bring to your financial services business and develop your customer experience positively.

Bottom Line 

Ultimately, chatbots can bring immense benefit to your business and rapidly increase the value of your overall customer experience. Whether you’re looking to generate leads, improve conversion rates, make life easier for your customers or cut costs in your staffing rates, chatbots are the future, and the future is now.

Start using chatbot services and see immediate benefits to your financial services business to get ahead of the competition. It’s relatively simple to install, and the results are rapid.

Good luck with the future of your business!

Contributed by Nicholas Rubright, the communications specialist for Writer, an AI writing assistant designed for teams. Nicholas previously developed content marketing strategies for brands like Webex, Havenly, and Fictiv.

Commbox – a Multifunctional Chatbot Builder for Your Business 

Commbox is a leading AI-powered omnichannel customer communication platform that allows you to manage all your communication from one smart interface. Additionally, Commbox allows you to create smart conversational chatbots powered by AI and machine-learning capabilities.

Commbox Chatbots: 

• Learn from every interaction with your customers and get smarter over time.
• Communicate with other bots and transfer conversations from one Bot to another according to the flow of the conversation while keeping complete transparency from the customer’s point of view.
• Identify types of conversations (sales, customer service, etc) and route a specific conversation to suitable departments or agents.

Use Commbox’s WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger chatbots to scale up your customer service and sales.

• Build a chatbot in minutes using Commbox – be available 24/7!
• Manage all customers interactions from a smart central inbox.
• Automate repetitive tasks.
• Improve customer experience while keeping a unified brand tone and voice.
• Quickly respond to customers while tracking any conversation.
• Integrate your CRM with all communication channels.
• Track your performance on eCommerce and generate insights.
• Sell products directly from your marketplace.

Use Commbox’s Conversational AI-powered chatbots to improve your customer communication on multiple platforms, engage more customers simultaneously in the right tone and voice, boost customer satisfaction and loyalty over time. Improve your operational efficiency, save time and human resources while you reduce costs and increase your revenue.