How Is Conversational AI Helping Banks Address Post-COVID Challenges?

Professionals in the banking industry are still recovering from the chaos and aftermath that COVID-19 brought to the world. No one knew how long the effects of the pandemic would last, but they are still present in businesses today.

While banking companies are beginning to recover today, they continue to face post-COVID challenges such as scaling up to meet renewed demand, improving customer support, and rebuilding their workforce. Fortunately, conversational AI is playing a massive role in helping with these objectives and demand for Conversational AI is increasing.

As noted by a report from McKinsey, "technology disruption and consumer shifts are laying the basis for a new S-curve for banking business models, and the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated these trends. Building upon this momentum, the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies within financial services offers banks the potential to increase revenue at lower cost by engaging and serving customers in radically new ways."

AI itself has proven to be tremendously instrumental for banking companies. However, additional solutions are needed for banks to stay competitive during this trying time, which is where conversational AI comes in. Now, let's dive into how conversational AI can help banks overcome the post-COVID challenges and pain points they're still experiencing today.

Address the Talent Shortage

Considering the ups and downs of the past few years, it's likely that your financial institution has laid off employees and is now ready to bring in new recruits, or your staff took it upon themselves to seek new positions elsewhere. Whatever the case, your organization is now struggling to maintain the workforce needed to fill gaps in customer service. 

Conversational AI is instrumental in helping banking companies address the talent shortage in myriad ways. 

Improve Onboarding

With an influx of new hires comes the need for training. Traditional onboarding methods can be time-consuming for new hires and managers alike. Not only does this take away from more valuable projects, but it also costs your business money and delays the start of your new employees in their roles. Fortunately, conversational AI can significantly expedite and improve the onboarding process. 

New hires can interact with a virtual AI assistant to get the support they need during onboarding. Conversational AI can facilitate these processes by answering questions, providing resources, or guiding employees through routine tasks. Not only will this simplify and accelerate onboarding for new hires, but it will save your upper-level employees from micromanaging these tasks. As such, all employees can get back to work faster, ensuring your business has the workforce needed to thrive.

Supplement Your Current Workforce

No matter how quickly onboarding can be conducted, there will still be a gap of time between getting your new hires started and relieving your (likely) overworked current staff. With any talent shortage, the extra labor falls upon a company's pre-existing staff. However, this doesn't have to be the case with conversational AI. 

Conversational AI can perform many tedious and time-consuming tasks that occupy your workforce, giving them back the time and capacity needed for more pressing tasks. Additionally, they can use virtual AI assistants as a resource to expedite other tasks, such as retrieving documents, filling out forms, and interacting with customers. As such, you can alleviate your current staff's heavy workloads as you onboard new team members. 

Resolve Customer Concerns

The pandemic posed financial challenges not only to businesses but customers as well. Customers will come to your organization with questions they want to be answered promptly and accurately. Conversational AI can significantly improve your customer support processes by answering customer inquiries, providing resources, and guiding customers through your business' services. 

24/7 Support

As customer concerns arise, they will want them resolved as quickly as possible. And, as you are a financial institution, many of these concerns impact customers' lives–whether regarding bank statements, mortgage payments, or investments. Whatever the case may be, customers want reliable support from your organization. With conversational AI, your company can offer 24/7 support, ensuring that it will find a quick resolution no matter the issue. 

Intelligent Interactions

Thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP), conversational AI is capable of highly intuitive and intelligent interactions with your customers and employees. Rather than feeling like they're speaking with a "robot," customers can communicate with your virtual AI assistants and feel like they're talking with a human. This ensures that inquiries–no matter the tone, language, or complexity, can be answered with ease. 

Improve the Decision-Making Process in Banking

Problems in staffing and in delighting customers are only part of the problem that conversational AI can address. There's also a distinct need to improve the way that banks can produce better decision-making. 

Thanks to conversational AI, you can help customers quickly get to the heart of the matter, using straightforward questions to interrogate your bank's online virtual representative. Helping your customers obtain the answers they need when comparing various financial instruments or going through "what-if" scenarios can be immeasurably beneficial to your bottom line. Doing so will also impress your loyal customers, who should be pleased that you are unrolling new solutions to streamline their experience doing financial transactions with you.

The new, fast advances in such technologies as conversational artificial intelligence "can lead to higher automation and, when deployed after controlling for risks, can often improve upon human decision making in terms of speed and accuracy," according to McKinsey. It noted that the potential to create more value is perhaps the largest in banking, "as AI can potentially unlock $1 trillion of incremental value for banks, annually."

Conversational AI will ensure significantly improved accuracy in a bank processing and employee decision-making when integrated with your company's database. Whether referring to follow-up actions or gathering customer data, conversational AI avoids the risk of human error. As such, it does wonders to improve your efficiency rates and impress customers who appreciate the precision of the replies they get from the conversational AI system.

Conversational AI Is the Future of Banking

While we hope the world won't experience another global pandemic, it's critical that your business can address the challenges COVID-19 has introduced–and be prepared for whatever the future may hold. Fortunately, conversational AI makes it simple to overcome problems such as talent shortages, customer concerns, and errors in decision-making. With this solution, you can address these current obstacles and bring your processes back up to speed. 

More and more industries are pursuing the use of conversational AI to improve the way they do business with customers. The use of conversational AI will only increase as more banking institutions, and customers find success in relying on them to take care of routine banking tasks, onboard customers, support employees, and delight customers. 

If you're interested in learning more about DRUID's conversational AI solutions for banking, download our free whitepaper on "Future-Proofing Banking with Conversational AI."