Raghu Ravinutala, CEO & Co-Founder, Yellow.ai
By Raghu Ravinutala, CEO & Co-Founder, Yellow.ai
The Global Findex Database by the World Bank indicates that almost 80% of adult Indians have bank accounts but are still considered underbanked. With the pandemic driving everyone indoors, we’ve seen an acceleration in banks adopting new-age tech solutions to connect with customers through multiple digital touchpoints, driving an evident shift from financial inclusion to financial empowerment.
Voice AI for Financial Inclusion and market expansion
As per Gartner’s AI and ML Development Strategies Study, by 2023, 80% of consumer apps will be developed with a “voice-first” philosophy. Banks are revamping their digital strategy and embracing conversation-led banking to deepen customer engagement and differentiate services.
The first generation of chatbots for fintech industry proved the hypothesis of customer convenience with reduced costs with 247 service sans bias or delay. With the advent of Conversational AI and NLP, AI-based chat and Voice Bots are enhancing the customer experience with hyper personalization, mimicking the branch experience with the ability to converse in customer’s preferred language, providing them familiarity and comfort with complicated banking services. Fintechs have a potential cross-sell and up-sell opportunity with a large segment of the banking population. Voice-enabled solutions give you the power to overthrow the barriers posed by device knowledge, texting capabilities, and more importantly the language barrier. Today, voice bots converse and transact in regional dialects and language, empowering millions of people left between the urban-rural divide. Powered by Conversational AI platforms, banks can deploy bots that support over 100 languages and dialects, enabled with sentiment analysis and smart analytics.
Voice-enabled banking virtual assistants can handle payments, transfers, credit card activation, password resets, and pay alerts and reminders for customers anytime and from anywhere, freeing-up customer-service teams to focus on more complex customer enquiries and enhance productivity.
Automated banking services enable greater connect with the customer
Establishing a close relationship with your customer enables you to have a longer period of engagement and even increases your cross-sell up-sell rates. By deploying a voice automated customer support that is available to the customer 24×7, you are giving due attention to all queries of the customer. A voice AI-based customer experience (CX) support can enable several convenient features. For example, banking services have always been categorized as siloed, especially for semi-urban and rural communities. This is largely due to the dearth of banking services available to them in close proximity or difficulty in following through with complicated banking protocols. Voice automated platforms enabled with NLP (Natural Language Processing) in regional languages can help with daily banking needs such as deposit and transfer of money, adding/updating beneficiaries, intelligent savings, and investment advice armoured with expense analytics. This can also lead to decreased fraudulent activity and increase accessibility by enabling customer support in multiple languages across various text and voice channels.
Another example would be disbursal of loans. A voice-based CX platform can help determine the customer’s eligibility, enable hassle-free disbursal, and also keep track of EMIs.
Making Contact Centres Smarter
Most banks have been investing in large contact centres for handling inbound customer queries – a large share of these calls are generic, with almost 65% of customer queries being repetitive. Deploying a voice enabled bot reduces the stress on human agents and allows them to focus on critical tasks, thereby optimising contact centre OPEX. Additionally, sophisticated natural language and machine learning capabilities enable accurate discovery of the customer’s intent, facilitate interactions beyond elementary transactions, and assure frictionless banking with a high level of contextual engagement. All of this leads to greater customer satisfaction and improved customer experience.
Moreover, voice-based CX can empower a banking institution to take on an omnichannel approach as the industry gets competitive. The unilateral platform/channel approach with siloed services hinder seamless customer engagement. Conversational AI solutions create bespoke customer journeys to stay relevant and differentiated from competition. By partnering with the right automated CX platform such as Yellow.ai, bots can be deployed across 35+ text & voice channels including mobile phones, Google Assistant, Alexa, WhatsApp bots, etc.) of their choice.
Two of India’s largest private banks are currently using Yellow.ai voice virtual assistants for inbound and outbound customer service. Up to 65% of support queries can be addressed and resolved by voice AI assistants so that customer care teams can focus on critical issues.
Conversational AI – Empowering India to achieve complete financial inclusion
Making financial commitments is hectic enough in a country like India. Voice-enabled AI CX delivery platforms can merge the best of AI and human capabilities resulting in seamless CX that reaches the hinterlands. Conversational AI has become the base of sustained CX with tangible impact, across businesses. New technology has the potential to create a significant impact on financial services as the sector relies on continued relationships with its customers – their key custodians.
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Disclaimer: Content Produced by ET Edge
