Year: 2021

As customer experience becomes one of the primary drivers of growth , banks, and financial services institutions are increasingly looking at innovative technology solutions to simplify customer journeys as a strategic tool for growth. Conversational AI is making a mark as a primary agent of change as banks attempt to increase customer satisfaction while making their processes more efficient.

Conversational agents (Chatbots) have been helping banks save a precious 4 minutes per customer interaction. By 2022, these bots will power more than 90% of all banking interactions, including those related to credit cards. Even now, Credit Card chatbots are powering the entire life cycle of customer use, from application to payments.

Credit Card Life Cycle

Irrespective of the type of business, there are five primary stages of a customer life cycle; reach/awareness, acquisition, conversion, retention, and advocacy. From the perspective of credit card customers, banks/financial institutions and customers need to perform the following activities for each of the above phases;

Reach/Awareness

This stage is where a prospective customer becomes aware of various credit card services by a bank/institute and the benefits a credit card brings to them. To drive home the point, banks can also share special offers for customers to obtain the card.

Acquisition

If the cards’ availability and offers make the customers interested, the next stage is to capture this interest. This interest becomes a lead that banks can then pursue to win over a prospective customer. Banks can ensure the customers’ interests by providing more nuanced information, including each type of card’s benefits. These benefits include rewards and cashback, loyalty programs, and any other incentive a customer gets by availing of the card. Based on this information, the customers would either make a preliminary application or provide the contact information so that a bank can reach out with more details.

Conversion

If the customer is convinced about the benefits and applies for a credit card, the bank needs to get the required document to ascertain the eligibility. Banks also need to calculate the customer’s creditworthiness and ensure there is no fraudulent or inaccurate information. If everything is alright, the banks then issue and activate the card.

Customer retention involves two different aspects for the bank; they need to ensure that they are making profits from the credit card operations while ensuring that they do not go away. From the operational perspective, once the customers start using the card, banks need to keep track of spending and invoice the customers at predefined intervals. They need to send payment reminders until the customers pay. The banks need to conceptualize and convey continued rewards and benefits to the customers on the retention front.

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One of the critical phases of the consumer life cycle is continued loyalty and advocacy, where the customers become your brand ambassadors and growth agents. This stage is where your loyalty initiatives, including referral programs or enhanced credit limits for better customers, can ensure your customers become your advocates.

Cross-cutting Concerns

Apart from these lifecycle stages, certain events may happen anytime during the life cycle. Primary among them are users losing the cards or defaulting on the payments. In both cases, the banks may have to block the existing cards. Apart from this, there might be customer inquiries, statement requests, or requests related to adjusting the credit limits that can take place anytime.

How Credit Card Chatbots Help Both Banks & Customers

Well-designed chatbots can be valuable tools to serve credit card customers throughout the lifecycle effectively. Not only will they contribute to customer satisfaction, but they can ensure the efficient execution of operations for banks or financial services institutions.

Reach/Awareness

The conversational interfaces (chatbots) can succinctly inform your audience during natural conversations about credit cards you offer and what benefits they bring for the customers. These bots can work with multiple channels, including websites or your apps on mobile devices. These bots can be part of your comprehensive customer service toolkit to provide a consistent experience.

The AI technology powers the bots through natural language processing to identify the right context to introduce your credit card services without being intrusive. Possessing the capabilities of contextual conversations makes compelling for banks from a customer satisfaction point of view.

Contextual Targeting

can gain additional intelligence by analyzing the historical data about spending habits, credit history, transaction history, and many other parameters. By leveraging the intelligence generated through such analysis, you can utilize chatbots to identify the right audience segment that can benefit from credit card products.

By addressing the customer pain points through such behavioral and contextual analysis, banks & FIs can establish a proactive conversational channel. Customers value relevant information rather than random intrusive advertisements.

Such intelligent outreach can also utilize personalization by addressing individual customers’ unique needs and increasing the conversion rates for banks.

Learn more: 9 Best Chatbots in the Financial Services Industry

Acquisition

With chatbots, customers can get increasingly detailed information without too many hassles. Such data can include details about various cards, individual benefits, rewards, and eligibility, all with the natural conversational patterns. Bots can even present personalized information for individual customers to help each customer understand this information efficiently.

The proactive ease of information availability helps increase customer interest in your card product. Once the customer has all the information, they can apply for a specific card through the chat interface.

Conversion

Conversion is a crucial stage from an institution’s perspective as this stage must maintain a balance between customer service and operational efficiencies. Credit card chatbots ensure customer satisfaction by facilitating seamless interactions for customers. Be it uploading the documents by customers or informing them about the outcomes of each process step.

The underlying computer vision and natural language processing algorithms, along with predictive analysis and anomaly detection capabilities, find probable fraudulent documents and risky applications for better scrutiny. Of course, such capabilities rely heavily upon the algorithms having trained with large and accurate datasets. But gradually, these machine learning algorithms become more accurate through self-learning. The can act as conduits of all this information in natural ways between customers and banks.

Credit card chatbots play a vital role in retention, given their capabilities to facilitate proactive interactions with customers. The bots can remind customers about their dues and enable customers to make payments against those dues.

The bots can help convey any probable fraudulent transactions flagged by the underlying algorithms. Quick identification of such transactions helps both banks and customers against threats and risks.

Through the help of predictive analysis using Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, the intelligence component of the credit card chatbots can identify customers with higher flight-risk. Banks can then proactively take appropriate retention measures. Proactively taking such measures helps banks ensure higher retention rates.

Advocacy/Loyalty

As the prime drivers of customer satisfaction, conversational credit card chatbots help banks inform customers about loyalty programs and their benefits. They also facilitate customers to utilize those benefits.

Based on spending patterns and payment history, bots can suggest enhanced credit limits for the customers. This way, bots become agents of growth for banks and financial institutions.

Using demographic data and credit card purchase history, credit card companies can offer targeted promotions and deals to customers digitally.

As customer satisfaction increases through such personalized, contextualized, and practice information availability, the customers, in turn, become your ambassadors, recommending your services to others.

Banks can utilize the bots to advise customers on overall financial health management. Rather than customers reading a manual or an article on money management, a chatbot providing personalized financial advice would be a great way to turn a customer into your advocate and ensure long-lasting loyalty.

Cross-Cutting Concerns

can help customers block their lost cards and reapply for the new card. Royal Bank of Scotland’s (RBS) online chatbot “Assist”- earlier called “Luvo”- is an example of how customers can report lost cards and request blocking them .

Bots can also identify non-paying customers and send them reminders about pending payments. Upon non-payment beyond a threshold, the underlying business logic can also block the card.

Banks can also enhance the effectiveness of these bots and entire operations by capturing customer feedback seamlessly.

Fraud Detection

Fraudulent transactions are a significant concern for banks and financial institutions. With bots, banks & FIs can leverage predictive analytics into their existing fraud detection workflows to reduce false positives. Underlying AI capabilities could analyze and score credit card transactions on their likelihood of being fraudulent by assigning a risk probability score, using predictive analysis or anomaly detection.

Predictive analytics algorithms do need extensive training on a large amount of data. However, the training allows the algorithm to understand an acceptable transaction versus a possible fraudulent one. Such training may also discover previously undiscovered fraud methods and start flagging more fraudulent transactions. MasterCard’s “Decision Intelligence,” the fraud-detection solution, is an excellent example of how the power of ML & AI can help detect and possibly prevent a fraudulent transaction.

Learn how AI Chatbot will transform the Mortgage Industry in 2021

What care should you take while using Credit Card Chatbots?

While chatbots help efficient credit card operations and higher customer satisfaction, they need careful consideration and efforts to be effective.

1. You must ensure that you have trained the bot with enough high-quality data. The ML algorithms have better accuracy if they utilize large datasets. At the same time, inaccurate data labeling may result in erroneous inferences by bots. Both of these scenarios may harm customer sentiments.

Such training also determines the questions and queries that the bot can answer. Banks should be careful about including data that represents the entire cross-section of their customer demographics and operations. For example, institutes must train the chatbots in multiple languages that their customers speak to work in a multilingual environment. While some of these requirements may not be critical, thinking about such edge cases can provide you with an edge when it comes to customer delight.

2. You should use it as another channel of communication, not the only one. Your customers should have other options to perform the same operations if they find them more comfortable. For example, many customers may prefer to communicate via email in bits and pieces. Consistent omnichannel experience is critical for better customer satisfaction.

3. Let your customers also choose to talk to a human assistant any time they want. Limiting their options to virtual assistants may prove to be counterproductive.

4. Instead of rolling-out the bot’s capabilities in one go, incrementally releasing facilities help the customer better adapt to them. You can also benefit from customer feedback to provide better options for solving their acute problems. Once they see the benefits, you can then gradually roll-out increasingly complex use cases.

What are the Advantages of a Credit Card Chatbot?

A Credit Card Chatbot can benefit banking institutes in many ways, such as:

• It can reduce the human agents’ workload by automating repeated queries of the new users and customers.
• Enable an experience for your customers using different channels for interaction.
• Stay available 24/7 and during peak hours to answer the repeated queries of customers.
• It can speed up operations and reduce the cost of your operations.
• Educate thousands of users at the same time about loyalty programs, rewards, and special offers.

Given the advantages, the use of chatbots to manage credit card lifecycles is growing fast. Bank of America, a banking and chatbot implementation leader, uses their chatbot, Erica, to serve clients with comprehensive service for their credit card transactions. Many other institutions like JPMorgan Chase and Fargo Wells are using chatbots to help their banking operations increasingly. As the market leaders see the benefits, the rest of the institutions follow the lead.

Check your credit score with this Smart Skill:

With credit card chatbots, banks and financial institutions can ensure better customer interactions and get an intelligent agent contributing to business growth. These automated intelligent agents , through conversational interfaces, offer better targeting by recommending the right product to the right customers. By analyzing customers’ interactions and data, banks can offer customized products to each customer via the . Through personalized communication, banks can ensure better customer relations, ultimately resulting in sustained business growth, and chatbots are vital instruments for that.

Want to develop an Intelligent Virtual Assistant solution for your brand?

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Can Credit card Chatbots double the customer base? was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A FAQ Chatbot will bring your First-Level Support to a new level!

In this article we will show how to implement a FAQ chatbot with Rasa to answer FAQs and fill in forms. For working with forms, the Rasa framework with the FormPolicy offers a simple way to create simple yet user-friendly bots for this task without the need to write extensive dialogs.

In the article “ Create a chatbot using Rasa” we described how to create a simple chatbot with Rasa. We showed how to install Rasa and initialize a first project. We also illustrated how to have a simple dialog with the bot.

To show this use case, we describe a chatbot which allows to reserve a hotel room and answers basic questions about the hotel. An exemplary implementation can be found at https://github.com/Steadforce/rasa_faq_form_bot. This article describes the creation of the chatbot using the implementation found there.

Rasa 1.8 was used for the creation. Since at the time of writing this article only the first alpha version of Rasa 2.0 was introduced, Rasa 2.0 is not covered. First, we will start with our chatbot answering questions.

Building the FAQ Chatbot

To start, initialize a project in an empty folder using the Rasa CLI. If Rasa is not yet installed and you don’t know how to set up an initial project, you can follow the steps in our previous tutorial.

After initialization of the project we delete the *intents, stories and unnecessary configurations of the domain. Now, intents are created for three questions. The FAQ chatbot can be asked questions about the location of the hotel, its appearance and possible activities there. We first create these within the NLU data under data/nlu.md.

With the ResponseSelector Rasa has a functionality that simplifies the handling of small talk and FAQs. This functionality is used below. For this purpose, the questions within the NLU data have to be specially marked, ie. the questions need to followthe pattern ## intent: faq/ask_<name>. The question about the appearance of the hotel is shown below as an example. To use the ResponseSelector, at least two intents must be created.

## intent: faq/ask_location
- Where is the hotel? 
- Where can I find you? 
- The hotel is where?
- In which city is the hotel? 
- Where is the hotel?

After creating the intents, the responses, i.e. the reactions of the bot to the user’s intent, must be prepared. This is not done via responses within the domain as described in the previous article. To avoid the domain.yml file becoming too confusing and overloaded with configurations, we add a new responses.md to the data folder.

In this file the responses. to the previously defined questions are generated. Responses are created similarly to stories, but with only one switch between user and chatbot.

# Ask location 
* faq/ask_location 
  - The hotel 'To speaking bot' is located in the heart of Munich with a panoramic view of the Alps.

The advantages of the ResponseSelector are now evident in the creation of the story. It is not necessary to create multiple stories, which deal with each individual question. Within the stories under data/stories.md all FAQs are treated in the same way and there is no distinction between them. This can be a major advantage especially for chatbots with a lot of different FAQs.

## Some questions for faq
* faq 
  - respond_faq

Ultimately the intent faq and the action to answer the questions of the domain (file: domain.yml) must be added so that the FAQ chatbot can be trained with the command rasa train and then tested via rasa shell.

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FAQ Chatbot: Filling a form through dialog

The FAQ chatbot is now able to answer simple questions. In the following we enable the Bot to accept reservations. In order to do this, Rasa offers the possibility to fill in Forms. This article describes only a PoC with limited functionality.

With Entity Extraction Rasa offers the possibility to enter complex data types into forms. Thus, it is possible to correctly interpret user data, such as “Tomorrow afternoon at 14:00”. For more information please refer to the Rasa documentation at https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/nlu/entity-extraction.

To fill a form in Rasa you first have to add the requiredFormPolicy under policies in config.yml.
The next step is to add the form that is to be filled to the domain within the domain.yml file.

forms:
  - hotel_form

The required policy is added, and the form is included in the domain. As with the questions to be answered, we generate a story, which shows the process of filling the form. For this we first set up the intent request_room within the domain and define sample contents for the training under data/nlu.md.

Here we add two different versions of the intents. The first intent only contains the information that a room must be reserved.

## intent:request_room 
- I would like to book a room

Another possibility is to transfer information already in this intent. So, you can specify so-called entities within this intent. In this example, the arrival date is used for this purpose. It is important that the slot and the entity have an identical name, in this example date. Slots and entities will be specified in the further steps.

## intent:request_room  
- Is a room available from the [11/02/2020](date).
- I would like to book a room for the [10/03/2020](date).

These two intents now make it possible to fill one of the fields at the beginning of the form. We also include them in the domain under domain.yml. During the further completion of the form, the user is not asked which date he wants, since this date was already specified at the beginning.

Now we will build a story that shows the optimal case for filling the form.

## Form Happy Path  
* request_room
  - hotel_form
  - form{"name": "hotel_form"}
  - form{"name": null}

iTo fill the form in a dialog, we write the Python class HotelFormwithin actions.py. This class inherits from the classFormAction and implements the four methods name, requiered_slots, submit and slot_mappings. The purpose of each method and its implementation is described below.

name

This method simply returns the name of the form as defined within the domain. This allows Rasa to perform *mapping between the Python class and the form defined within the domain.

def name(self) -> Text:
  return "hotel_form"

required slots

This static method returns all mandatory fields/slots of the form. This is done as a list. The order of the list also defines the order in which the chatbot will ask the user for the mandatory fields. In this example, the number of people, the date of arrival, the number of nights and the room type are the required fields of the form.

It would also be possible to dynamically define fields as mandatory based on the user’s input. A use case might be, if children sleep in the room, the indication whether a crib is needed. If no child sleeps in the room, this question is unnecessary and is therefore not asked. In our example, however, dynamic mandatory fields are not included and therefore the code looks like this:

@staticmethod
def required_slots(tracker: Tracker) -> List[Text]:
  return [
    "number_of_persons",
    "date",
    "nights",
    "room_type" ]

To use the slots we define them under slots in the domain. This is also done under domain.yml. DThe definition of a slot specifies the name, the data type and in special cases the possible values of the slot. In this example we only show the slots number_of_persons and room_type.

For the two other slots, a correct data type must be selected and then the procedure is the same as fornumber_of_persons. The slot room_type is an example of a slot with a limited choice of values. At this point the user has the choice between two variants, which are displayed in the chat with the bot as two buttons.

slots:
  number_of_persons:
    type: float
  room_type:
    type: categorical
    values:
      - Junior
      - Senior

To complete the changes associated with this method we still need to prepare the questions that the FAQ chatbot will ask to fill the slots. These must also be created within the domain (file: domain.yml). They have to be set up according to the fixed structure utter_ask <slot_name>. A special element is the slot room_type. In order to provide the user with only the two selection options as buttons, we create this response as follows:

utter_ask_room_type:
- text: "In which room do you want to sleep. In a junior or senior suite?" 
  buttons:
  - title: "Junior Suite"
    payload: '/choose{"room_type": "Junior"}'
  - title: "Senior Suite" 
    payload: '/choose{"room_type": "Senior"}'

submit

The submit method is executed when the form is completely filled. It may be used to save the reservation. This example only executes the action utter_submit. This action prints the user’s input and thus confirms it.

def submit(
  self,
  dispatcher: CollectingDispatcher,
  tracker: Tracker,
  domain: Dict[Text, Any],
) -> List[Dict]:
  dispatcher.utter_message(template="utter_submit")
  return []

In order to execute the response utter_submit, it must be defined within the domain. By specifying the name of the slot within the response text, the current value can be output. For example, if we want to output the value of room_types, this is done as follows:

“We have received the reservation for a {room_type} suite.”

Within a response any number of slots can be output with their current value.

slot_mappings

Before we define the last method of the class calledslot_mapping, we have to add another intent to the domain. This is the intent that the user executes to fill the form. For this we add the entities number, data, days and room_type and the intent inform to the domain.

intents:
  - inform
entities:
  - number
  - date
  - days
  - room_type

Now we add sample contents with the respective entities under data/nlu.md. The entity room_type does not need this, because it is filled by a choice of two buttons. We recommend to provide at least 5 examples per entity for a correct training.

## intent:inform
- There are [4](number) of us
- We are looking for a room for [2](number)
- The [03/05/2020](date) is my date of arrival
- On [04/15/2023](date)
- [4](days) days
- I will be in the hotel for [1](days) day

We added the entities and slots to the domain and set up the intents within data/nlu.md for the training. Now the last method is the mapping from entities to slots, here a very simple version. The mapping is done with the method form_entity of the class FormAction. As parameters the entity and a list of possible intents is passed. The mapping is done within the dictionary, which is returned by the method.

def slot_mappings(self) ->
  Dict[Text, Union[Dict, List[Dict[Text, Any]]]]:

  return {
    "number_of_persons":
    [self.from_entity(entity="number",intent=["inform"])],
    "date": [self.from_entity(entity="date", intent=["inform"])],
    "nights": [self.from_entity(entity="days", intent=["inform"])],
    "room_type":
    [self.from_entity(entity="room_type", intent=["inform"])],
  }

Executing the FAQ Chatbot

To execute the chatbot correctly, we now start the action server of Rasa. Actions created by the developer are executed within this server. Even more complex actions can be created within Rasa. For example, we can integrate external interfaces and use them within actions. Thus, an error within an action does not lead to the termination of the bot itself, since it is executed independently.

We start the server with the command rasa run action. With the parameter -p <port> it is also possible to specify an alternative port if it differs from the standard port 5055.

If you now start the chatbot with rasa shell, filling the form won’t work. The reason for this is that in the configuration fileendpoints.yml we have to link the two servers, the action server and the chatbot itself. Therefore we have to add the initially commented lines:

action_endpoint:
  url: http://localhost:5055/webhook

Now we can use the chatbot after a training via rasa train using rasa shell. An example dialog for filling the dialog is shown below.

*Intent = Intention of the user. For example, if a user enters “show me yesterday’s technology news”, the user’s intention is to retrieve a list of technology headlines. Intentions are given a name, often a verb and a noun, such as “showNews”.

*Entities/Entity = In data modeling, an entity is a clearly identifiable object about which information is to be stored or processed.

*(Data-) Mapping = The process that maps data elements between different data models. Data mapping is needed as a first step for various information integration tasks.

Prospects

In this article we have built a chatbot for answering simple questions and making a reservation. This implementation does not yet include error handling. So far, the bot can’t react to unexpected questions. Also, the user can’t ask any questions during the reservation.

This chatbot doesn’t offer the possibility to fill slots through external interfaces or based on dependencies either. For all these problems Rasa can offer a solution to create the optimal chatbot for each situation.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

---

How to create a FAQ Chatbot with Rasa? was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In recent years we have witnessed tremendous development in the financial sector and banking industry. Financial Technology is also acknowledged as FinTech, a state-of-art program designed for the financial industry to provide next-level customer service to their users through chatbots. Chatbots in fintech are intended to assist customers with their requests in the most dynamic way and act as a guidance channel from which they can better understand the customer needs.

What is a chatbot & its significance in distinctive industries?

Chatbot is an artificial intelligence (AI) computer software program known as digital assistance that simulates online chat or via text-to-speech using different languages through a website, messaging apps, or a telephone. Chatbot is designed to understand human skills. Chatbot interprets the user request and provides a prompt solution.

Chatbot is a cost-efficient system built that promotes any industry’s operational performance by offering them convenient and effective services for their customers. Chatbots act as an instigator across various business industries.

With emerging technologies in fintech, AI is developed on deep learning to assist a massive number of customers at the same time without reducing the quality of services. Right from facilitating swift money transfers via mobile banking and net banking with the highest security to single scheduling tasks such as paying bills, clearing client’s invoices, buying bitcoins, etc., with the help of a chatbot.

Chatbots have become an intelligent solution for the significant financial and banking industry. They have eliminated the long queues at their branches, saving time and energy, giving customers the liberty to get the work done from anywhere without compromising the safety.

In recent years, Haptik introduced ready-to-use 100+ smart skills tools, a high-quality virtual assistant custom-crafted for various industries from retails, e-commerce, insurance, finances, telecom, travel, and hospitality, etc.

Haptik’s smart skills in the FSI industry developed chatbots that assists the customer’s in a diverse financial queries such as quick account balance check, mini statement of last five transactions, credit score, application status, loan assistance, loan payment calculator, upload documents virtually, assisting the user with account opening, and much more.

With the emerging technologies in fintech, chatbots are reshaping the digital marketing of the industries. Current studies show that 85% of the consumers prefer to get the chatbots’ solution instead of visiting sites and scrolling or posting the question on the search box.

Fintech companies need to handle various complex databases as well they need to store some confidential data of their customers, and it is humanly not possible to handle everything at once. Instead of getting more employees to handle the work and get them trained will add more time, chatbots make it easier by running everything flawlessly. The company doesn’t have to depend on their staff, and no matter what time it is, they can access the data on the system.

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1. Use-cases of Chatbots in Fintech Industry

According to a Business Insider report worldwide, 67% of customers are using chatbots for customer support. Customer service in fintech is considered the primary essential function to run the organization. Hence, chatbots help companies have high customer service expectations and automate their profit while saving customer service costs by hiring more individuals.

Let’s find out how the emerging technologies in fintech adapt AI chatbots strategy and benefits to the industry and customers.

a. 24/7 Support

The 24/7 service can be integrated with a hotline number, website, quick text message assistance, mobile applications, and social media channels to empower the customers’ service greatly.

This service is an essential piece of staying always connected, offering a high level of professionalism, and assisting customers through a complex process such as blocking debit/credit card in theft, account balance summary, generating pin, etc.

b. Financial Advice

An interesting paradox of the real-time digital fintech era is to get financial advice online. The intelligent AI-powered chatbots analyze a user’s spending behavior and the transaction history to predict their future actions and recommend them.

For instance, if the fintech chatbot identifies an excellent transaction history, it helps them invest money for the future. Likewise, if it detects bad spending habits, it assists with money management.

c. Digital Payments

Digital payments in chatbot fintech are peer-to-peer-payments and help the customers make various kinds of transferring money processes. The automation in fintech chatbot has linked the bank account or Paypal or Apple Pay or Stripe or with other digital apps such as Paytm, amazon payment, etc. of the customers and assist them with paying bills, money transfer, online shopping, etc.

d. Advertisement

Emerging technologies in fintech, the chatbots, help the industry grow with an online advertisement on robust social media platforms such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, youtube, and quora. With the millions of social media users, the AI-powered chatbots in fintech scan the users to target the audience.

e. Investments

Notably, a fintech chatbot can assist the users with personal financial advice and digital payment and assist in growing money in different ways. Digital fintech chatbots powered with AI help users create and manage online portfolios and assist in ingenious savings methods.

f. Insurance & Loans

Automation in the fintech industry is offering insurance and loans with ease and the comfort of home. Chatbots are designed to provide interactive insurance and loan product solutions to more people.

A customer needs to answer some simple and specific questions. A chatbot can then automatically respond to the queries, offering them customized and cost-effective services and assisting the customer in uploading the proper documentation to avail the services

Read more : How personal finance chatbots can help users redefine money management

How Chatbots Can Transform the Fintech Industry?

With the emerging technologies in fintech, AI chatbots are revolutionizing the customer experience. Customer service provided by any fintech industry is equally important as the services or products they sell.

As the fintech industries are now enabling wide-spread adoption of quick mobile wallets to their customers effectively, it introduces affordable options over the smartphone, proving to be a reliable financial instrument.

Let’s find out how the digital fintech provides customers with the opportunity to use the services seamlessly.

a. Removes The Friction Of Cluttered Interface

38% of people close the sites or apps within five seconds if they find the software’s complexity. AI integrated fintech chatbots help to smooth the friction and reduce the tech barriers. The inbuilt chatbots are designed to detect the human behavior and understand their needs.

b. Offers Proactive Suggestions

With the small pop up screen, a few numbers of the display can be seen at a time, and rather than the users keep searching for the services or product they need, the chatbot assists them by giving offers and proactive suggestions based on the answers the users provided for the simple questions. It is enhancing the personal experience.

c. Keeping Up With Millennials

Digital fintech chatbots are designed to keep up with millennials. With every recent technology advancement, the demand for instant assistance has grown tremendously, and millennials are steadily communicating via social media. Chatbot access and convenience quickly assist them and help to simplify millennial’s lives.

d. Automates Fraud Detection

Data privacy and security are the most important concern for any business because their prestige relies on them. Digital fintech chatbots are effectively monitored and issue a warning flag when they detect any scam activities and alter the bank and the customer.

e. Easy Marketing of Services

Automation in fintech chatbots helps in diversifying the audience traffic and promotes the company’s services and products. Assisting the consumer in buying the products directly in the chat. Chatbots promotes the brand image via diverse social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc.

f. Enhances Customer Loyalty

Fintech chatbots are designed to provide users engagement more proactive. It also attracts more customers who wish to browse the services or products without having a verbal interaction. The information gathered via chatbots helps the companies understand the consumer requirements and provide them with the services and products they need. It automatically enhances customer loyalty towards the companies.

g. Reduces Cost

Fintech chatbots are a one-time expense that turned into an investment and cheaper than hiring more agents. It is not only a cost-effective system, but the ability of the chatbots to deliver the result in seconds saves time as well.

The users love the chatbot interaction because they can ask effortlessly what they need in their own language. Emerging technologies in fintech offer chatbots for one-stop solutions and personalize each user’s experience by lessening the wait time and navigating sites.

i. Increases Revenue

Fintech chatbots powered by AI technology helps in generating business revenue. Chatbots work like the way how e-mail marketing operates. The difference is the sales funnel developed in chatbots is interactive and stimulation the user’s conversation assisting them in choosing the right services and products they need.

From personalized shopping to a simplified buying process to secured payment getaways leads to a higher number of consumers.

Future of Fintech

The future of fintech brings the revolution in financial sectors by providing better and new services and products to the consumers. Fintech is forever changing the finance industry’s prospects. AI changes the way enterprises interact with their consumers.

The financial sector is one of the industries that is considerably operating with complex systems for decades and urges to react to keep up with the evolving technology to fulfill the demands of tech-savvy users.

The spread of automation in fintech with AI-powered chatbots is considered the hottest service to provide various users assistance in less time. More unprecedented access to consumer information through AI, cloud computing, and analytic continue growing and changing and targeting users with different behaviors and needs.

[Expert guide] — Factors to Consider While Implementing Conversational AI for Financial Services

Conclusion

Fintech is reshaping the way people think about money. The introduction of chatbots allows fintech companies to provide value-added services to their customers and change the command based role to a conversation-based part. The emerging technologies in fintech immediately solve the consumer’s queries and support.

Improved customer service experience leads to more customer satisfaction, which makes the company attract more profits from loyal customers. All data collected via fintech chatbots give the company insights on how to improve and provide better communication and financial results.

Want to develop an Intelligent Virtual Assistant solution for your brand?

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Fintech Chatbots: How AI Chatbots Play A Role In The Fintech Industry was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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[Ending] Exclusive VIP Promo for Conversational AI Conference

SAVE $170 and Get Tickets for only $49!

Hi, hope you are healthy and well.

As a way to thank you for being a subscriber and a way to inspire our community to create more Conversational AI Systems we are offering you a Discounted Pass to the Chatbot Conference for only $49!

The Chatbot Conference Online will be held on May 25th-27th and features speakers from Google, Salesforce, IBM Watson, CoCoHub, Rasa, etc. It’s the perfect opportunity to discover how enterprises are using Conversational AI and to network with top industry experts.

Here is what you can expect:

1. May 25th| Discovery Day is the core of our conference. Here you will get a top down understanding the Conversational AI Industry from the top industry experts and do deep dives in the most important areas like NLP, design, use cases, key KPIs, explore ROI, product and team management. We end that day with our Zero to Launch Panel and Virtual Happy Hour and Networking.
2. May 26th | Design Day is a full day Certified Workshop on Conversational UX. In this workshop you will design a Conversational Ai Agent that helps your users accomplish their goals. You will learn about onboarding, creating a happy flow, managing failure and much more. This workshop is taught by the Conversation Design Institute.
3. May 27th: Development Day is a full day Certified Workshop during which you will develop the Conversational Agent you designed. In this workshop you will learn how to implement NLP, Intent/Entities, Slot Filling, Context, etc. Our focus is to help you build a functional MVP that will answer ~10 FAQs.

Typically, we charge up to $899 for our Conference and Workshops.

You can now attend the Chatbot Conference on May 25th for only $49 and SAVE up to $400 on Workshop Tickets.

Hope to see you there!

Stefan

Cheers!

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Ending Today: Exclusive VIP Promo for Conversational AI Conference was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Implementation of chatbots is considered to be the epic and quintessential customer engagement strategy in the e-commerce sector at present. According to some recent surveys, around 2.4 billion customers have chosen chatbots over human interactions as they are capable of answering 80% of standard questions effectively and accurately. Juniper Research claims that the use of chatbots could result in savings of around 2.5 billion hours of time for both customers and business enterprises by 2023. The best part is, all these functions are fully automated when it comes to chatbots. The chatbots are technologically programmed to communicate with multiple brands using one program, which reflects a positive impact on the retail businesses.

How Chatbots are revolutionizing shopping experiences for customers:

For being a top-notch e-commerce enterprise, and have your brand trending in the market you need to comprehend the power and role of chatbots in revolutionizing customer experiences. The AI-enabled chatbots contribute in noteworthy ways, simplifying and facilitating a shoppers’ purchasing experience.

1. Personalised experiences: Chatbots are capable of handling one to one conversations with the customers and providing them with individualized suggestions and solutions as per their shopping preferences. It has been observed in a survey conducted by Epsilon, that 80% of customers are drawn to shop from brands that extend personalised assistance to them.

2. Improvement in team efficiency. There is a pool of questions that are repetitively asked by the customers. It becomes a monotonous job for the staff to answer them time and again. Chatbots can unravel this problem by providing intelligible replies to those frequently asked questions thereby saving a lot of manual time and cost. This further allows the team to focus on more intricate issues which require unavoidable human attention.

3. Accelerated interaction and engagement. The shopping assistant chatbots are stationed on several messaging platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, Email, etc. for an expedited communication with the consumers. Approximately 67% of digital customers prefer to have a chat through these messaging apps while interacting with any business firm.

4. Real-time resolutions. Customers appreciate instant and pertinent responses. This is what exactly the chatbots do. These virtual assistants promptly attend to customer queries and resolve them without any delay. This low effort — swift service is highly appreciated by the shoppers as they can now avoid the long queues in getting their problems or confusions settled.

5. Eligible Offers & Promotions Customers love to have their aspired products at a reasonable price. They love it more when it’s at an exclusive discount. The shopping assistant chatbots make this happen seamlessly by letting them know about the current offers or discounts offered by the store. The chatbots provide details about gift vouchers and coupons that are offered on festive seasons or other special occasions so that the customers can proceed with the purchase of their wishlist products. The chatbots also serve as gift guiding assistants to help the customers in selecting gift items for various occasions thereby taking your brand a step closer to their hearts.

6. Visual Searches. Enabling the choice of visual search in chatbots enormously contributes to your sales escalation efforts. With visual search where the customers can upload pictures of their desired items to search through your inventory, your brand gets the push it needs to heighten engagement. Chatbots also provide visually illustrated suggestions to the buyers so that they can anticipate whether the product they are about to purchase is as their expectations and requirements thereby triggering a confident purchase decision.

[On-Demand Webinar] The Big Retail Reset: The New Way of Buying in 2021

Why your brand needs shopping assistant chatbots

It has become crucial for e-commerce companies to feature shopping assistant chatbots so as to assist the customers and facilitate their shopping decisions. The shoppers can directly interact with the virtual shopping assistants for necessary information instead of steering through multiple menus on the company’s website. The chatbots are effectively programmed so that their services are not restricted to a specific domain.

Engage with your store’s visitors resulting in an increased conversion rate :

Customarily a shopper navigates through numerous online stores before finalising the suitable product. About 80% of customers shopping online practice this. The foremost reason behind this strategy is to get the best deal of their desired items. For instance, if a buyer is looking for a t-shirt, he will browse through various brands selling t-shirts. Your brand will have a very short time-span to attract the attention of your prospective buyer. The chatbots help in retaining customer attention by engaging with them in human-like conversations , understanding their shopping preferences and then offering them the most suitable variety of products from your store’s collection. Using both AI and ML technologies the chatbot even notifies the buyers when there is any price drop or additional discount available on their desired commodity. This in turn helps in converting the store visitors into buyers through effective communication. Before coming up with admirable options the chatbot considers the valuation of those products taking into account the applicable discounts, cashback options or benefits of various payment methods.

Facilitate decision making and order placement for customers

Customers like to get an extensive variety of options for their coveted commodity but often end up getting confused while shortlisting the products from a whole catalogue. Chatbots make this task easier for them. Adhering to their filtered preferences and browsing history, the shopping assistants formulate a curated list of items that the customer is searching for. This becomes possible due to their omnichannel presence across numerous digital platforms. The AI automated chatbots have alternated the manual order placing process by predicting the customer preferences from their past orders and placing their order quickly. The e-commerce chatbots even assist the customer by comparing the same product from different brands in terms of cost, discounts, quality, delivery timing and other relevant specifications. The prediction technology of the chatbot empowers the promotion of brand identity. It becomes effortless for your customer to buy the most suitable item from your collection and this draws them to your brand every next time.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Chatbots and Email Marketing Integration Can Help Your Business

2. Why Chatbots could be the next big thing for SMEs

3. My Journey into Conversation Design

4. Practical NLP for language learning

Improves overall accessibility of product information

While sorting out and narrowing down on the product they want to buy the customers sometimes come up with additional queries, directly or indirectly related to the products. To get their doubts cleared they often navigate from the product page to visit the e-commerce website and access the information. But with the presence of a chatbot, the customers do not need to leave the product page to get their answers. The chatbot itself answers the frequently asked questions and provides all the necessary information the customer is looking for. Dodging this outward navigation from the product page enhances the chances of closing the deal.

Updating customers about their order and its movement

Apart from resolving customer queries, assisting them in making shopping decisions, another major functionality of the chatbot is keeping customers up to date about their orders. After placing an order the customers become eager and anxious to know about the status of their product. Therefore, many retailers enable the delivery tracking options for the customers to trace the whereabouts of their ordered items. That’s when Chatbots connect with buyers like real representatives of your brand. From confirming the successful placement of the order to keeping the customers updated about every movement until delivery, Chatbots work like they are working exclusively for the buyer’s order. The customers frequently raise queries about the current location of their order, the shipment, the cancellation procedure, delivery rescheduling and much more. Hence, the responsibilities of the chatbot do not end with the purchase of the order. They continue to assist the customers till the ordered item reaches them and they are satisfied with it.

Simplifies communication between your brand and its customers

Customers are often reluctant to download additional applications for resolving their little queries and this often navigates them from the product page. Chatbot enabled conversations through the very common messaging apps make your brand more accessible to customers. If the customers already have any of the messaging applications, they can conveniently interact with the chatbot using these platforms and take a more spontaneous purchase decision.

Removes the needs for multiple registrations

If you have already enabled your shopping assistant chatbot to communicate through the messenger apps, then customers having those apps do not require any further registration. For example, If a buyer intends to communicate through Facebook messenger, then he/she can simply log in to his/her Facebook account to connect with the chatbot. The chatbot will immediately recognise the customer by his/her name, thereby stimulating a personalised communication experience. While this might seem not a big deal, registrations pinch your clock, it often distracts customers from executing the purchase action and navigates them elsewhere.

Filling up shopping carts by up-selling and cross-selling

The shopping assistants focus on ensuring that the customers’ shopping cart isn’t empty. They suggest a wide variety of products or services that the buyer may like, highlighting the specific brand’s brighter features or qualities, while also persuading customers to shift their wishlist items to the cart and take the final move. This gentle nudge to the desires of your customers can elevate the sales figures of your company significantly.

Assistance in managerial decision making:

Nowadays, direct interaction between brands and their stakeholders is crucial but complicated. The AI chatbots can digitally assist the brands in interactions with various stakeholders of the company and the management team can make better decisions based on the data and patterns captured by the chatbot.

Read on : 3 Ways Conversational AI Can Drive E-Commerce Sales

What to expect and anticipate from the implementation of chatbots

• Before effectuating the chatbots, the e-commerce companies should be well versed with the technicalities of these bots.
• The assistant bots will refine customer engagement not only by providing assistance in acquiring goods and services but also by strengthening customer loyalty and brand value through advanced interactive capabilities.
• Track the purchase mannerisms of the customers by obtaining information through customer reactions, A/B tests, etc. and stimulating increased customer engagement with the chatbots.
• Chatbots will help in automated operations by providing unhindered services across the year. As the chatbots will single-handedly organise a major chunk of customer associated programs your brand will be able to make some major savings in the cost of hiring a human workforce
• Predict customer moods through natural language processing (NLP) technology. The chatbots would be able to sense the tone of the customers and would immediately respond to them according to their moods.

Haptik’s smart skills is a tried and tested automated virtual assistant that accelerates the quality of the shopping experience your brand delivers. These Smart Skills are built to automate your brand’s strategy for upselling and cross-selling, impacting the revenue and cost incurred by the brand. A major chunk of everyday customer interaction is executed through pre-trained, easy to deploy Smart Skills. From booking an appointment for the customers as per their convenience to communicating with the online retailers, locating a nearby store based on customer’s location preferences, providing invoice copies over email, Smart Skills automates it all. Functions like IVA, check order status, triggering replacement or refund requests, updates on offers, coupons and promotions, collect product feedback, track the ordered items, display past and current order details, notify payment cancellations and speculate customer loyalty points. All these services are extended to both logged-in users as well as guest users.

Check out our new handbook on eCommerce Chatbots: Drive Sales and Customer Retention

Factors to be considered while selecting your chatbot solution

The chatbots are operated based on a set of rules as well as machine learning. The functions of the rule-based shopping assistant chatbots are limited to specified commands and their performance is based on a constricted set of rules and regulations. Whereas, the AAI-enabled chatbots are set to conduct a wide range of operations, starting from interacting with customers to interpreting their requirements.

1. Embeddable Knowledge base: Chatbots should contain a well-structured knowledge base to virtually assist the customers. To cater their services efficiently the bots need to acquire the relevant answering program from a reliable source.

2. Has no-code workflow builder: An interpretative chatbot along with a no-code builder design is the most labour-saving method to set up bot workflows. Without much tech dependency, all the relevant answers are covered by these easy to handle chatbot builders. Haptik’s Smart Skills, advanced by AI technology, are specified with Natural Language Understanding (NLU) feature which enhances the conversational aspects in the e-commerce businesses.

3. Open to third-party integrations: To capacitate the chatbots for faster resolution of frequently reported queries, it is necessary to integrate with third-party applications such as order management software, customer relationship management (CRM) and others.

4. Facilitates in-depth reporting: An efficient chatbot would present in-depth reports to the e-commerce firms to evaluate the productivity of all the operations going on

5. Allows integration with customer support software: A competent service-oriented bot is required to amalgamate with service software which would ensure that both the customers and retailers are gaining pleasant experiences using the chatbots.

A substantial number of brands operating in India and abroad have invested in Chatbots as they intend to use these Human-like companions to sell products directly thereby economizing both time and money. So, to pace up your brand’s growth implement chatbots that can be there for your customers as sincerely as you.

Want to develop an Intelligent Virtual Assistant solution for your brand?

GET IN TOUCH

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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8 Reasons Why Your Brand Needs a Shopping Assistant Chatbot was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One particular day in August 2018, Facebook announced that it would introduce WhatsApp Business API. And that was the last time that WhatsApp was just…WhatsApp- the go-to messaging tool to connect with friends and family. With the introduction of WhatsApp Business API, WhatsApp became more than that. It became a powerful marketing tool to reach customers. And when you have a ready platform, why not leverage it to its best use possible?

Why WhatsApp?

It’s no news that WhatsApp is massively popular with 1.5 billion active users globally. This means that WhatsApp messaging is an opportunity to revolutionize global communications. You may argue that you already have existing communication channels through which you connect with your customers. Probably your company website or Facebook Messenger. But let’s look at the numbers here. According to statistics, WhatsApp has 300 million more users than Facebook Messenger.

Except for 25 countries, WhatsApp is a messaging app leader globally. So if you have a large customer base in countries like India, Brazil, or Indonesia, you cannot ignore this messaging tool. WhatsApp definitely has the upper hand when you talk about instant messaging because your millennial prospects are already probably using it, and targeting them is easy and fast. All you need to do is seize your opportunity by having an engaging conversation with them using automated conversational tools like the WhatsApp bot.

Conversational AI in WhatsApp

Instant messaging in business is all the rage since 69% of consumers prefer texting to communicate with companies. Automated chatbot tools are proliferating in the market because of their ability to provide quick responses. You take this tool and blend it with the most used messaging app globally; you get WhatsApp chatbots. Check out some of fascinating statistics (Source: Freshworks) for WhatsApp Chatbots:

• 80% of the businesses using WhatsApp chatbots have the opinion that they help their businesses grow.
• More than 50 million businesses are already using WhatsApp Chatbots to connect with their customers.
• WhatsApp became the key channel in 2020 for scaling digital presence during the pandemic.

So next time, if you’re planning a webinar or making an announcement, you know how you can communicate with a massive number of people at once. Similarly, check out all the marketing goals that you can achieve with WhatsApp.

Advertising & Marketing

Let’s consider an example: A Marketing agency is campaigning for an exhibition for a client. You get an email invite and a WhatsApp message. What do you think you’ll check and open first? Emails just have an open rate of 15–20%, whereas WhatsApp messages see an open rate of 98%! The possibility of getting a response from WhatsApp is highest as compared to any other medium.

The key feature to note here is the automation. Yes, you can send WhatsApp messages yourself to your prospects, but can you send them to thousands of prospects at the same time and generate numerous leads? This is where WhatsApp bots play a crucial role. eCommerce companies are sending offers & discounts, and healthcare chatbots provide symptom analysis, all without the need for human involvement. WhatsApp Business account also gives your brand a verification with a green tick.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Chatbots and Email Marketing Integration Can Help Your Business

2. Why Chatbots could be the next big thing for SMEs

3. My Journey into Conversation Design

4. Practical NLP for language learning

Customer Support

I cannot speak about chatbots and not mention customer support. Through WhatsApp, chatbots take customer support a notch higher because they address customer issues on customers’ preferred medium of communication. Your chatbot on your website is available 24–7 too, but with the WhatsApp bot, your customer doesn’t even have to take the effort of going to your website.

For small and medium enterprises, WhatsApp bots can help with a lot of cost-cutting in hiring a customer service workforce and answering repetitive queries. With prompt replies and round-the-clock support, a WhatsApp bot can help you provide a wholesome customer experience.

Online Bookings

Keeping in mind the changing preferences and habits of customers, companies are now involving WhatsApp as a part of their booking processes. Hospitals are booking doctor appointments on WhatsApp, real estate chatbots are scheduling site visits, and online booking channels are booking for movie tickets, sports events, and plays, etc.

Order Tracking

Pick any big eCommerce company today. Just the sheer numbers of orders they deal on an everyday basis are enormous. They are using the WhatsApp bot for order tracking for both supply chain purposes and offering this service to their customers when they place orders. In countries where WhatsApp is the ultimate tool for messaging, it becomes easier to keep in touch with the logistics team and customers alike.

Case Study: How a Real Estate Developer drove sales with WhatsApp Bot

Praneeth is a leading real estate developer in Hyderabad, India. The company was incorporated in 2007 and since then has developed multiple residential projects in and around Hyderabad. Based in India, the group has leveraged WhatsApp to the fullest since, with almost 459 million active users in December 2020, India has one of the highest numbers of WhatsApp users globally. In India, 15 million companies are currently using WhatsApp business.

In the real estate industry, bots are a proven medium to get more leads. Praneeth Group has substantial traffic on their website, and they needed a tool to generate leads from their website visitors. They integrated a WhatsApp chat on their website to initiate a conversation. They knew their target market was on this instant messaging platform, and connecting with them through WhatsApp would give some results. Their objective for using the WhatsApp bot was straightforward: they wanted to assist customers in providing information in an interactive way about their upcoming and current projects and eventually generate leads and schedule site visits. To do so, they approached WotNot to integrate a WhatsApp bot.

After purchasing the WhatsApp Business API, they built a lead generation WhatsApp bot on WotNot’s no code chatbot builder. Their team designed a conversational flow where they start by giving a company introduction and asks the prospects what kind of home they’re looking for.

They added property images, area information, location, flat sizes, and other details in the bot. They also used emoticons to make the conversation more humane. They finally incorporated the bot on their website and provided a number on their site through which the customer can directly reach out to them on the phone.

Results

With the use of the WhatsApp bot, they had more than 450 conversations monthly, and out of these, 24 users scheduled a site visit to the property. Most of the conversations were happening over the course of the weekend. Since the conversations were automated, even during weekends, the bot could generate leads and schedule site visits without any sales team involvement.

The conversations also helped the group understand which properties were popular. They identified that 73% of their users looked to view the apartment property based on their conversations.

Praneeth group could also identify the number of new users and returning users on the bot using the analytics dashboard on WotNot. They could streamline their conversations and segment the users based on their conversational outcomes. Overall this strategy was successful because they knew that their customers were looking for information on WhatsApp. They gave it to them without the need for a live chat or overloading employees with additional responsibilities.

You can do it too!

Now that you know the benefits, why not try it out? You don’t have to be a technical expert to replicate such a success. All you need is guidance on building the bot, knowing what questions to ask, and developing the script. WotNot can assist you with every step.

Building a WhatsApp bot is relatively easy because of WotNot’s no-code chatbot building platform. Additionally, you can also access templates for different use case scenarios to develop the scripts.

To understand in detail, check out our article on “The Ultimate Guide to Building a no-code WhatsApp bot in 2021”.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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How businesses are successfully using WhatsApp Chatbots? was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.