The digital customer experience (CX) landscape is continually evolving, with AI playing a significant role in helping businesses, including those in the financial sector, build relationships with their customers and set them apart from competitors.
Conversational AI is rapidly proving to be a game changer for banks and financial institutions, enabling a recreation of the digital customer experience by driving meaningful business value via increased operational efficiency.
Head of MoData Interactive, Brendan van Staaden says,”Early changes in the application environment saw multi-channel communication taking centre stage where customers could interact using channels such as voice, chat, web self-service, email, and the like,” he added, “Recent changes have seen further evolution, moving these channels from rule based, menu option driven applications to fully fledged automated conversational channels.”
No one-size-fits-all
He believes that the importance of digital self-service and personalised application delivery can’t be over-emphasised, especially as customers become increasingly digitally savvy and demand instant solutions to issues and queries.
He says that, “Customers too have evolved with the digital landscape and a one-size-fits-all approach no longer cuts it. Customers want services, solutions and information crafted around their personal preferences and conversational AI (C-Ai) enables this.”
Inflexibility of legacy environments
According to van Staaden’s insights this is particularly true for the finance sector, where many legacy environments remain far too rigid and inflexible to deliver optimal customer satisfaction. He explained that by using C-Ai banks and financial institutions can address this issue head on in order to better retain customers and increase satisfaction.
“Any business unable to keep up with the demand or unable to keep pace with the speed of change in customer propensity will suffer significant customer churn simply due to their preferences shifting to more immediate service options,” says Van Staaden.
Banking on the benefits
Conversational AI combines Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and automatic speech recognition to provide support to customers when they interact with a business on their preferred channel of communication.
“Although artificial intelligence has evolved and automation has been in play for some time already, the game changer is the conversational business applications brought about through the maturation of generative artificial intelligence and the ability to leverage off this to boost the adoption of conversational AI,” says Van Staaden.
“Conversational AI enhances personalisation through the ability to collect customer data specific to their behavioural attributes and enhances personal experiences and preferences.”
