Spurred by high demands placed on call center personnel during the pandemic, chatbots have taken on new prominence. Today, thanks to cloud-based platforms, AI-powered chatbots are now within reach of many more banks and credit unions.
When the coronavirus pandemic led to widespread branch closures and restrictions, financial institution call centers were nearly overwhelmed by the ensuing traffic spike. The challenge grew especially acute as these centers — in-house or outsourced — struggled to deal with social distancing, absenteeism and other issues.
Various solutions were rushed out including work-from-home arrangements, which helped in some cases but were not viable for many. Chatbots were looked to as another option, and vendors of such solutions report increased interest and usage.
From March to April 2020, for example, Kasisto saw user inquiries through its KAI conversational AI platform rise 35% across all of its customers, according to Zor Gorelov, CEO. He adds that they have seen very meaningful increases in sales inquires during the pandemic. Another provider, Clinc, has also seen an increase in demand as institutions realize the benefits of automated conversational banking, according to Johann Hauswald, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer.
“Conversational banking and messaging and chat isn’t a niche channel for us, it’s a significant part of our strategy.”
— Katie Jenkins, HSBC Bank USA
While the COVID-19 crisis ramped up interest in these automated solutions, particularly for handling customer inquiries, the tide had already begun to turn for chatbots and their close relatives, virtual assistants. Various conversational interfaces have been around since at least the 1960s, but interest in chatbots soared in 2016 only to plummet within a couple of years. “Building a real virtual assistant capable of understanding context and responding to unclear queries proved to be much more challenging than building a simple chatbot,” CB Insights observes.
But that challenge has now been largely met. In fact several chatbot vendors now offer pre-packaged bots with data already built in that are tested and trained for a specific industry vocabulary and domain terms. Further, several vendors have products that can work with financial institutions far smaller than Bank of America, Chase or even Ally Bank, all of which offer AI-powered virtual assistants.
One example is Advia Credit Union, with assets of $1.7 billion. The Michigan-based institution uses a platform from LogMeIn that incorporates natural language processing. NLP helps the bot “understand” what consumers are looking for and respond in terms they can understand, Rey Chavez, Director of Member Contact for the credit union, states in a LogMeIn white paper.
