Ben Lewis, VP of Growth and Marketing, Infobip
“The financial services sector will continue to benefit from the radical transformation, with rapid digital adoption seeing the emergence of new technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Banking, financial services, and insurance players who want to benefit from the opportunities presented by digital financial inclusion need the right technology partner to connect them seamlessly with customers.
As fintech and finance companies navigate the emerging stages of the AI revolution, the integration of AI into customer communications is an essential opportunity. Research from McKinsey highlighted AI will have the largest impact as a percentage of functional spend on customer operations. While expectations are high, the path to greater productivity remains uncharted.
For many, this means embedding conversational experiences where customers have intelligent, two-way interactions on their favourite channel without the friction that many associate with telephone call centres. But critical roadblocks prevent the potential of generative AI from benefitting the customer.
- Talent gap: The world is preparing for an AI workforce crunch, especially for the technical skills associated with conversational AI like deep learning and natural language processing.
- Data divide: According to Omdia’s State of Digital CX 2023 survey, 47% of organisations find their data inaccessible. While companies have libraries of customer requests, reviews, and responses – the perfect source of truth for any transformation – the accessibility problem prevents them from turning data into action.
The Economist found that majority of banks are already leveraging AI to personalise the customer experience. However, when deploying modern technology like AI, financial services companies must put customers at the centre of their business and prioritise keeping their customer’s businesses secure. Financial firms that provide scalable full-stack solutions that can digitally transform financial institutions on a single platform, while keeping businesses and their customers protected with various authentication methods that are unsusceptible to external attacks, are set to thrive in this new era of AI.
These new technologies provide multiple touch points for generating conversational customer data, whether from support transcripts, customer reviews, chatbots or call logs, which they can use to test and train chatbots, identify trends, and understand customer pain points.
- Data engineering: a crucial and complimentary capability of AI, enables firms to continuously collect, observe, and organise raw data points from diverse sources. Fintech companies can use low-code workflows to find and isolate the data that matters most; the product team can search support tickets for recurring complaints, and the marketing team can analyse conversations regarding subscription cancellations.
- AI Chatbots: now offer round-the-clock support, personalized insights, and unprecedented convenience. They have evolved beyond support tools; and become personal finance coaches, offering bite-sized lessons on budgeting, debt management, or the basics of investing. Interactive quizzes and calculators can further enhance engagement. They can also analyse spending patterns and transaction data in real-time, and alert users to unusual activity to help prevent fraudulent transactions. Ultimately, providing customers with instant answers, proactive guidance, and control over their financial lives.
The advantages of are clear, with intuitive AI workflows enabling fintech brands to build conversational AI experiences from real conversations, which improves response quality and reduces agent load, but also presents significant risks in safeguarding this data. The sensitive nature of these conversations and any customer data that includes monetary information means it is vitally important that they are securely protected.
Breaches or loss of data are simply not an option, and so finance providers need to prioritise finding a technology partner that they trust to help them protect this data securely. In doing so, they can then realise the true benefits of these AI tools in enabling customer communications that are more efficient and more personalised, because of being data-driven.”
