Customers expect their financial organizations to provide highly efficient on-demand service and digital assistance, all wrapped in a welcoming and familiar brand personality. In turn, you have an imperative to supply a solution that addresses these needs so you can deliver exceptional experiences and drive growth.
An intelligent digital assistant, or “IDA,” is that perfect solution. While new technology rollouts typically present significant challenges, the onboarding process of your IDA is much easier when it’s built and powered by a digital experience platform.
That is not to say there isn’t a need for some cross-departmental collaboration and prep work. By following these three easy steps, you and your team can build the foundation for your IDA’s launch and go live in 30 business days or less.
Before You Begin
Before you start the three-step process to build and implement your intelligent digital assistant, we recommend you take a few precursory actions to align your goals for the project.
Select an Active, Engaged Executive Sponsor
This should be someone who understands your banking community, your employees, marketing, and your brand. That sponsor, working together with only one or two teammates, can quickly cover a LOT of ground.
Keep the Working Team Small
Lots of folks may want to participate in the design of the solution, and you will certainly need the input and buy-in of teammates from across your financial institution. But when it comes to “putting words in the mouth” of your digital assistant, you’ll move quickly and garner the best results if only a few employees make the decisions. Kasisto has found that the most successful implementations happen when our clients keep project teams small, which allows for design, review, and testing with only a couple of hours of work per day.
Ask for Help
Your core project team likely won’t have expertise in every product, service, and channel that your institution offers. Be sure to reach out to the internal experts to supply any facts that your team may need. And use that outreach as an opportunity to enlist fans of your new digital teammate.
When you partner with Kasisto, the launch of your IDA is a no-code process, so while you may want to have an IT professional available for consultation, there’s no need to schedule dedicated coding resources.
Kasisto’s Three-Step Implementation Plan
Once you’ve completed this pre-implementation work, it’s time to kick off your three-step launch plan. It’s important to follow these steps in exactly this order, as each subsequent step relies on the previous one.
Ready
First, you want to establish any KPIs for the project and prepare the overall project documentation. Kasisto works closely with you to set the KPIs most important to the success of your IDA, below are a few examples of standard KPIs to get you started.
Suggested KPIs:
Adoption and Usage Volume:
- Has your IDA been introduced effectively to its reachable audience?
- Are customers discovering it, and if so, are they engaging with it?
- Example of metrics: # of sessions /requests
Containment:
- Is your IDA able to answer users’ inquiries without the help of a live agent?
- Example of metrics: containment rates, handover reason
With your goals set, you can now bring in your brand team. The design phase of your intelligent digital assistant should be fun, but also important to give it some serious branding consideration. Think about the right name. Will your IDA have a gender? What are the right characteristics, tone, voice, and imagery to convey your brand and engage your customer base?
For example, one of our clients, BankSouth, developed an intelligent digital assistant named Rita. By knowing their financial institution’s clientele, the team decided that a peppy and casual approach to their IDA best fit their customers. You may also choose to develop your IDA’s personality over time, like the global financial services group BBVA, which allowed its IDA to adapt to its users’ questions and unique personalities.
Spending some thoughtful time upfront to make the right choices will pay off throughout the project lifecycle. Your team will find it easy to design and review responses once they understand the distinct “personality” of the assistant.
Set
In this second step, you want to focus on humanizing your assistant. No one wants to interact with a “bot,” but people do enjoy interacting and conversing with intelligent digital assistants. By the end of 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact regularly with conversational platforms to purchase products and receive support and education, according to Gartner research.
People turn to IDAs because they’re knowledgeable, engaging, and always on. They provide a non-judgmental safe space to ask questions that consumers may not feel comfortable asking a human.
You can humanize and prepare your assistant for customers by following this dual process:
- Create a detailed list of customer queries, or “intents.” Identify as many potential questions a customer might have.
- Then, establish a bank of responses to these intents. These responses should be directly aligned with the IDA’s voice and personality established in the Ready step.
KAI is our bank-smart digital experience platform that powers your IDA and comes pre-configured with a massive set of intents and responses. When you combine this preloaded knowledge with additional questions you identified, you end up with a robust base of curated and specialized financial knowledge
Go!
The third and final step begins with a testing and QA phase designed to ensure your intelligent digital assistant works without any bugs or issues at launch. The application of quality assurance and tests with your IDA increases your chances of a successful debut and helps eliminate and correct any potential errors or bugs.
Once you’ve completed testing, it’s time to introduce your IDA to your financial institution’s internal team. This step is critical to gain buy-in and excitement from your organization. Consider a fun, in-person event that highlights and celebrates the team(s) that worked on the project, and gives employees a chance to experience your new IDA. At the very least, convey the upcoming launch of your IDA with relevant internal communication.
Then, it’s time to officially launch your IDA to your customers!
Once your IDA is launched, you want to continually optimize it and maintain a positive trajectory. Kasisto’s post-launch team helps with this by monitoring IDA usage, updating links, and making suggestions as needed.
Our experience and insight with large financial institutions can be scaled down to smaller financial institutions and credit unions. We’re used to working with both large and small customer bases, and our post-launch “HyperCare” provides a consultative, personal approach to both sectors.
Get Your 30-Day Launch Plan
Want to see the entire breakdown of Kasisto’s three-step implementation process? Download our infographic to get the full scope to learn the ideal IDA personality best suited for your financial institution.
Ready to begin? Let’s start a conversation to get your financial institution on its way to automating amazing banking experiences.
