How Chatbots are Helping the Finance Industry

By 2020, almost 80% of businesses will start using chatbots for customer service, according to a recent Oracle report. 32% of business leaders also think that it will be one of the most important technologies to improve customer service.

In an age where consumers expect nothing but the best and fastest service possible, chatbots can help you enhance your customer experience. Not just that, they can also provide a lot of other benefits for your business and your customers.

Here are some of the most common ways in which chatbots in the finance industry can benefit both you and your customers.

Generate Cost Savings

The most notable benefit of using chatbots in the finance industry is that they can save you a lot of money over time. The cost to deploy chatbots is not nearly as much as the savings they can generate for your company.

The truth is that answering thouthands of frequent questions instantly would be a great challenge for a traditional Customer Service. You would need a huge team, working day and night to solve the same queries over and over again.

Do you really need human intelligence for this task? People are here to think about strategies, develop new and creative ideas. In short, your team is for the big leagues.

On the other hand, chatbots are specially designed to answer questions automatically. Therefore, you’ll take more advantage of your most valuable resource: your time and your agents’.

Related read: How financial institutions can reduce customer service costs using chatbots

Improve Customer Experience

Another great benefit of using chatbots in the finance industry is that they can help you enhance customer experience.

Wondering how that's possible? Let's take a look at some of the ways in which using chatbots in the finance industry can help you deliver better customer experience.

24x7 Customer Service

Using a chatbot, you can provide 24x7 service to customers around the world. Your customers don't have to wait for the official work hours to get their answers as they can simply interact with the chatbot at any time. This is a convenient option that allows you to serve customers from different time zones.

For example, Easynvest uses an AI-based virtual assistant that can answer most simple customer queries. This helps the company provide 24x7 customer support to its customers around the world. What's more, is that the bot has helped them reduce the average customer handling time to just 1.13 minutes.

Instant Problem Resolution

A big challenge that customers face with phone support is that they often have to wait for several minutes for their calls to get through. Customer service centers can only handle a limited number of calls at a time and conversations also take longer when it involves human interaction.

Interacting with chatbots can help customers get instant resolution to their issues, saving them a lot of time that they would have otherwise spent waiting. This helps create a more positive customer experience.

Easy Site Navigation

Another way that chatbots can improve customer experience is by helping them navigate your site to find the right resources with ease. Chatbots can guide your visitors to the right destination and help them find what they’re looking for without going through several pages to reach there.

Assistance with Day-to-Day Financial Needs

One of the key uses of chatbots in the finance industry is in assisting customers with financial transactions and providing financial advisory services. A lot of financial institutions leverage chatbots for this purpose as it not only improves customer service but also generates valuable leads.

Imagine a chatbot telling you what kind of plans you should invest in based on your needs and preferences. Or a chatbot helping you select the most suitable insurance plans. It could also be something as simple as keeping track of your expenses for you. No matter what kind of financial assistance users need, chatbots can help them with it.

Forextime, for example, uses our chatbot to provide customer support, answer questions, and generate leads. It can guide customers on different types of accounts and which one will suit their needs. This way it generates leads and identifies customers who might need to open an account. It works both on web chat and Facebook messenger.

Empowered Agents

If you use chatbots for small, repetitive tasks like answering simple customer questions, your employees will have free time to focus on more complex tasks. They can spend their time on finding ways to improve customer service instead of answering day-to-day customer questions.

Overall, from a human resources perspective, you can hire employees with better skills for complex tasks and automate most of the simple, routine work using chatbots.

Gather Consumer Insights

Another brilliant way to use chatbots in the finance industry is to leverage them to collect feedback and provide consumer insights. The use of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning technologies enable chatbots to generate valuable insights through Big Data. Chatbots can literally learn from past data and evolve.

Related read: Artificial Intelligence: What is it and how does it work?

This same technology can be applied to learn user behavior, develop individual user profiles, and make personalized recommendations. Combine that with an interactive questionnaire or survey and you can practically know everything about a user and their financial habits.

You can also ask your customers to let you assess their financial health and preferences before you start offering your services. This way, you will have a database of valuable customer information that you can use for a variety of purposes.

Increase Sales Conversions

Chatbots have now emerged as a new marketing channel as they are highly effective for lead generation and sales conversions. When someone visits your site, a chatbot can greet them and guide them to the right products and services. This directs the prospective customers further down the sales funnel and generates relevant sales leads.

For existing customers, chatbots can cross-sell or upsell products by making personalized recommendations. It is easier to convert existing customers as they are already familiar with your business and have a certain level of brand trust.

You can also use chatbots to present offers and discounts to existing or potential customers to encourage purchases.

Someone who is already on your website or page and looking at your products/services is a high-intent user, which means they’re more likely to convert. So presenting them with offers is a good way to get more conversions. And unlike other marketing channels, chatbots can do this in real time at strategic moments in a buyer’s journey.

Related read: Online Sales: Best Practices to Sell More Over the Internet

Conclusion

Chatbots are disrupting the financial services industry in a big way with companies using them for a variety of purposes. Chatbots play a crucial role in the finance industry in generating leads, providing customer service, cutting costs, and a lot more.

They can help automate a lot of simple tasks and free up time for your customer service teams to perform more complex tasks. This leads to enhanced customer experience and cost-savings for your company in the long run.

If you want to beat the competition, you should definitely consider using chatbots for your business. It's easy to incorporate into your business and quick to install.