Conversational Platforms in Banking - Thematic Research

Artificial intelligence-powered tools can help address many customer enquiries, but they can also cause frustration if not properly supported. Experience from other implementations is that banks must be upfront about what the bot can be expected to do, and direct consumers to it with the right expectations. It is critical to have smooth hand-offs and channel transitions at moments of complexity, ambiguity, or other types of financial stress. Overall, a bot-only approach is doomed to failure. However, judicious use of bots with careful design can reduce costs, dramatically increase customer satisfaction, and free up advisors for more complex sales and service interactions.

2016 saw an explosion of interest in chatbots, as financial service providers rushed to launch the ‘next big thing', promising low-cost, personalized, secure, 24/7 customer support for everything from balance checking to complex sales and service. By 2017-18, many of the first movers had scaled back bots or removed them completely, and by 2020, many new entrants were using the absence of bots as a competitive differentiator. Even today, JPMorgan Chase's new UK digital bank, Chase, advertises itself as “only humans…no bots”.

Those banks that have taken a more measured approach, designing bots to deal with specific processes and task-flows that absorb most call center resources, have taken out significant costs with limited broken glass in terms of customer satisfaction. Bots for internal document processing and specific customer-facing tasks have both proved effective. These bots have primarily been text-based, existing on bank web pages and in mobile apps, but especially in third-party messaging platforms, such as Messenger and WhatsApp.

Social media style interfaces, sitting at the heart of super apps, have reset consumer expectations. Banks are emulating these principles to offer always-on, personalized ‘advisor-in-pocket' propositions. These services have much in common with robo-advisors and personal financial management, yet go one step further in being accessible outside of proprietary banking channels, where users spend most of their time, operating by text and/or voice. However, demand for these services, across all age groups and wealth brackets, remains in the low single-digit percentage point category.

Scope

The publisher surveyed consumers on satisfaction with chatbots across key geographies, and we see that at 86% the US has the highest level of satisfaction and implied comfort with bots among bank customers, while Australia sits at the lowest level of satisfaction (81.9%), with the highest percentage unsatisfied at 18.1%.

When we break out channel satisfaction for bots by age group, we see that satisfaction is actually lowest in the US - the most satisfied market for bank bots overall - among the oldest (65+) and youngest (18-24) customers. That is likely because younger customers have higher expectations of intuitive, human-like bots, as they might use in other verticals whereas older customers are likely more suspicious of automated interactions generally.

When we ask bank customers (globally), which tasks they prefer chatbots to undertake, the overwhelming majority of users chose to not rank any task at all - only a very small minority of customers ranked any task first. This confirms bots today are not perceived as a premium touchpoint.

Reasons to Buy

• Identify key players within the conversational platforms banking value chain
• Understand key trends within the conversational platforms in banking theme
• Learn about the key players operating in this space