With the continuously evolving landscape of the BFSI space due to fierce competition, technology disruptions, and changing customer expectations, the industry has had to keep up with new trends to effectively engage with their customers. Today’s empowered customers prefer a digital approach to obtain round the clock assistance, easy accessibility, data security, and personalization in their service. Banks adopting digital systems have benefitted tremendously with streamlined integration. Hence, providing customers with an engaging experience.
Emerging technology trends like AI have helped banks accelerate their digitization processes. A recent survey by PWC-FICCI revealed that 83% of Indian BSFI players strongly believe AI to be a must-have technology for enhanced customer experience and 57% of them feel that AI will give them a competitive edge. Among many use cases of AI in the BFSI industry, chat automation accounted for 82.6%.
As the banking industry looks to make a foray into digital services, here are some trends that it must leverage to enhance customer engagement-
Chat automation: Banks should consider adopting AI-enabled chatbots as a channel for automating routine tasks such as checking bank balances, paying credit card bills, changing addresses, and so on. For more complicated situations, chatbots may be able to connect customers with the appropriate human agent, allowing for quick and seamless engagement.
Tutorial videos: Through digital banking customers can be provided with virtual lessons or explainer videos on financial concepts like NEFT, RTGS, or IMPS transactions, investments in mutual funds, etc. These explainer videos will help customers avail opportunities that will educate them into making decisions that are best suitable for them.
Omnichannel customer experience: Customers today connect with banks using their preferred communication channel like websites, apps, contact centers, physical bank branches, etc. This provide an opportunity for banks to deliver an integrated, unified customer engagement across all channels. omnichannel banking will help banks curate a platform that will enable real-time synchronisation across both physical and digital modes.
Data intelligence: Understanding consumer preference is at the center of customer engagement. To provide experiential banking, BFSI players must leverage data analytics to derive meaningful customer insights and help deliver customer engagement activities that will fast-track enhanced CX applications.
Recommendation engine: AI/ML enabled engines provide personalized recommendations to customers from their banking partners on the right product/ service, based on customer profile, easing customers into making the right choice.
Focus on cybersecurity: With increasing cyberattacks, banks must solidify cybersecurity measures to ensure a risk-free architecture for customers. BFSI players must leverage cybersecurity tools to establish trust and security. From a security standpoint, a cloud contact center can ensure protection across customer data and privacy. It is important for banks to ensure that their contact center platform meets all the compliance requirements. For instance, a contact center platform must be PCI compliant to ensure safe practices for handling credit cards and other payment information. Similarly, SOC 2 certification is important to deal with privileged financial information of clients.
Apart from the security benefits, with a cloud contact center, the vendor or service provider owns the tech platform and there is no requirement of an extensive internal technical staff to oversee the entire process.
Cloud banking: There are multiple benefits of cloud banking. With latency and speed, cloud ensures that websites and apps have less downtime compared to on-site hosting. Cloud also integrates data in one place, enabling real-time data access. There’s no denial that positive human connections and experiences are becoming more important than ever and banks must strive to achieve that. In the process, it’s crucial for banks to incorporate cloud based solutions/offerings for a seamless customer experience. Rather than making customers wait for long hours to get their queries addressed, cloud-enabled analytics will help collect quick information and insights into human behaviour basis the conversation between a customer and employee.
Digital banking has created new avenues for customer engagement and experience. Through technology trends banks can now offer tailored customer needs, offer a hyper-personalized experience and access to banking partners 24/7. However, it’s crucial for BFSI players to understand that digital banking is not merely switching to online mode or building an app. The focus should lie on creating an immersive and hyper-personalized banking experience through omnichannel customer engagement that optimizes various touch points and provides a consistent customer experience through all modes of communication.
Among other emerging tech trends data visualisation, cloud computing, computer vision, artificial intelligence and biometrics can also be leveraged to enhance customer engagement and ultimately the relationship between the bank and its customers by delivering a personalized, immersive experience through increased digital adoption, as opposed to traditional banking that heavily relies on customer engagement through physical branches.
The blog has been authored by Uthaman Bakthikrishnan, Executive Vice President, ClearTouch.
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