Chatbots have become commonplace in digital banking as a quick and simple way to provide automated customer service. While these chatbots have elevated the speed of service, banks can expand on this innovation by using an intelligent digital assistant, “IDA,” or virtual banking assistant.
Intelligent digital assistants take the concept of a chatbot to the next level by adding personal, agile, and experience-focused conversations to the tried and true formula of virtual support.
Here are three ways that banking virtual assistants provide a better banking experience than chatbots can offer.
Comparing Chatbots vs. Virtual Banking Assistants
1. Knowledge Base
When faced with a consumer query, chatbots pull from a limited library of scripts and frequently asked questions. This “single turn” approach to providing answers can limit customer service by delivering only a simple path to a predetermined response. When faced with more complex or unknown queries, chatbots can often break and leave the consumer feeling isolated and frustrated.
In banking, virtual assistants are pre-trained with knowledge from a wide array of financial situations, which gives them a more comprehensive conversational foundation of experiences, languages, and terms to draw upon in order to address specific customer needs. Instead of static, generic answers to a narrowly worded question, customers want meaningful information that addresses their unique financial circumstances. IDAs use natural language understanding (NLU) to offer deeper insights and more personalized information about topics like spending habits, savings opportunities, or possible credit score improvements.
IDAs deliver personalized conversation starters based on their deep knowledge of a customer’s financial history and behavior patterns. Through these individualized conversations and interactions, financial institutions can improve customer satisfaction and unlock new revenue opportunities by offering customers more choices and providing more relevant recommendations.
KAI’s digital assistants, like KAI Consumer Banking and KAI Business Banking, are fluent in banking on their first day at work. They come pre-trained on Day One with more than 1,000 initial conversational intents, and they continue to learn and become more insightful as they interact with customers. They are deployed in some of the world’s largest banks and innovative community financial institutions, which gives KAI a proven level of financial literacy not found in other conversational AI solutions.
2. Resolving vs. Advising
The primary role of a banking chatbot is to serve as a customer service tool that answers common, transactional questions from customers who need quick help accessing financial information. While they have their place in the customer support toolkit and are expected to see usage grow during the next five years, chatbots offer a fairly limited set of capabilities. Their objective is to swiftly resolve a consumer’s basic, transactional question, or move them on to human intervention. This limitation often leads to incomplete problem resolution and a high customer abandonment rate.
Intelligent digital assistants, on the other hand, act as knowledgeable bankers who can walk alongside a customer and recommend the most informed next step in their specific financial journeys. For example, instead of simply displaying account information, IDAs can share recent activity that may have impacted a customer’s account, such as a lower checking account balance due to an increase in a monthly utility bill. This personalized conversational capability equips banking customers with intelligent insights about their personal financial situation and helps them to make smarter decisions.
KAI’s digital assistants combine fast self-service with tailored guidance to deliver the personal experience of a knowledgeable banker, but in a digital format that meets customers’ expectations for convenience and speed. It’s like taking your best banker and applying them to a digital space.
3. Future Growth
Chatbots function to fill gaps and support the staff in your customer service department, without much capacity to retain and grow relationships. Some analysts even say that chatbots have failed the customer service industry through confusing end goals and clumsy conversations.
By contrast, intelligent digital assistants drive meaningful growth across banks and credit unions by reducing servicing costs, keeping calls out of the contact center, and allowing human team members to focus on revenue-generating activities. IDAs guide your customer through interactions and help them to discover additional insights and services that are potentially relevant to their personal financial goals and situations.
Using conversational skills, a deep data library, and AI-driven analysis of usage patterns, virtual banking assistants understand what the customer is asking and can seamlessly direct customers to what they want while encouraging them to explore additional engagement options.
The KAI Platform reduces servicing costs by at least 10% by handling more than 80% of customer interactions without the need for human intervention and increases engagement by 4x, which allows you to introduce new products and services to customers and drive revenue growth.
Do Digital Banking Differently
Banking customers don’t just prefer to engage digitally; they expect to do so. KAI is the “bank-smart” digital banking experience platform ready to make your digital channels come alive and animate your brand across customer touchpoints. By utilizing KAI, you can take your best bankers and the personalized care they deliver and expand on those capabilities with a virtual banking assistant.
KAI lets you deploy a set of AI-powered digital assistants trained to emulate your best bankers. They host human-like conversations, typically matching and often exceeding live agent performance — and KAI makes it possible in real time, any time, across all your channels. A well-performing IDA can bring serious ROI to your business and increase Net Promoter Scores through brand satisfaction and customer loyalty.
At Kasisto, we remain committed to leading the digital banking industry into a new era of intelligent digital assistants that meet and exceed expectations. We deliver the industry’s most transformative conversational AI experiences, and we’re ready to make your digital assistant the channel for customer engagement.
Interested in learning more about the differences between chatbots and IDAs? Download our white paper. If you’re interested in deploying an intelligent digital assistant, take our 30 Days to Amaze IDA Personality quiz & discover what personality fits your financial institution best.
