The list of services, promotions, interfaces of mobile applications, tariffs for different banks are now similar as two drops of water. Good ideas from market leaders are implemented by other banks in a matter of weeks. The wave of self-isolation and quarantine measures turned into a storm and will be remembered for a long time, especially by those businesses that did not survive it and ceased to exist. Those who survived have tightened their belts and are waiting for quieter times to invest again, says Leonid Perminov , Head of Contact Centers at CTI. What? In his opinion, in the automation of customer service through the introduction of various dialogue robots based on artificial intelligence. We offer you the material published The material is also published in print and online versionNational Banking Journal (October 2020).
In the financial services market, it is clearly visible that the previously existing focus on customer experience management has only intensified, and the competition between banks is moving even more rapidly into the plane of improving customer service while optimizing operating costs. Along with this trend, quarantine requirements in many regions have brought to zero activity in bank offices, consumer, mortgage and car lending centers.
In one of NBJ publicationsIt is mentioned: despite the fact that in cities with a population of one million and regional centers, the penetration of digital banking is, according to various estimates, from 40% to 50%, statistics say that 25% of customers still visit bank branches at least once a month. In this regard, an urgent problem has arisen related to the fact that the client is physically impossible to reach, but somehow it is necessary to sell services.
The "cherry on the cake" in the work of financial institutions in 2020 is the transfer of employees to remote work, in which the issues of monitoring productivity and work efficiency, information security of work processes, and maintaining bank secrecy when working from home are especially acute.
In the face of dramatic changes in the external background and internal processes, many of our customers from the financial industry began to actively look towards the introduction of new and modernization of existing technology platforms, hoping to find a magic pill that will provide a breakthrough. In the field of customer service, the TOP 5 trends now look like this:
- AI-powered conversational robots to automate customer service.
- Tools for creating an effective and comfortable environment for remote customer service.
- Automation of routine operations to improve the efficiency of internal processes.
- Using truly omnichannel remote service solutions to develop customer loyalty.
- Information security solutions for monitoring remote work.
And, of course, in all these areas, as a system integrator, they expect breakthrough technologies that are easy to implement and at the same time extremely effective.
Let's take a look at what you can actually expect from "hype" topics, and whether they can really bring significant improvements to service processes by examining the most popular of them: customer service automation through the implementation of various conversational robots based on artificial intelligence.
Business integrator CTIhas implemented many projects for the implementation of systems to automate the customer service process, has extensive experience and expertise in all types of existing technologies for this. In modern realities, everyone wants to communicate in natural language, both in the voice channel and in the text, so the classic IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems or button bots have long become archaism and annoying. Fortunately, conversational robots have now ceased to be clumsy services that hardly understand what a person wants, and in some cases, especially in short conversations, they no longer differ from live communication. Whether it is necessary to strive for the robot to speak like a living person, or is it more correct to clearly emphasize that the conversation is with the robot is a separate debatable issue, and the correct answer strongly depends on the problem being solved.
The area of application of dialogue robots in the financial industry is now very extensive:
- the first contact with the client to classify the purpose of his appeal;
- text bots on websites, social networks and instant messengers;
- translation of the appeal to an employee with the necessary skills and qualifications;
- providing information about products without the participation of a contact center operator;
- a welcome contact with a new client, where the robot can tell you where to start;
- registration of applications and documents;
- HR automation;
- identification of the client, extracting information from the bank's systems and providing it to the client in an automated mode without the participation of the operator;
- telemarketing surveys;
- collection work with debtors.
Modern solutions on the market have a lot on board:
- natural speech recognition modules with embedded language models;
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Despite such a rich functionality, you need to understand that any solution is a platform with one or another technology and functionality that needs to be configured correctly. And if you focus only on the marketing description of a software product, then you can fall into the trap of high expectations and become disillusioned with technology, not finding that very magic button.
When implementing such services, you can often get an explosive effect, which becomes a pleasant surprise for customers. I will cite a few examples from our practice of implementing self-service systems based on dialogue robots, showing how effective such automation is:
- On one of the projects, after one month of the system's operation in productive mode, almost 50% of issues in the customer service began to be resolved without human intervention, since most of the requests can be described in an algorithm and entrusted to a robot for processing them.
- Or, for example, in some scenarios, the automation factor reaches 90%, since these branches solve routine, constantly repetitive tasks of providing reference information. Now operators do not waste time handling such simple issues and can deal with more complex tasks.
- If the scenario is complex enough, the depth of the dialogue between a person and a robot can reach 3-4 steps, which makes it possible to determine the client's area of interest as accurately as possible and serve him in automatic mode.
Often, our clients report a significant reduction in the payback period of systems compared to the plan.
Does this mean that everything is absolutely cloudless, and, finally, that magic button "so that everything is good" has been found? Of course not. Many expect that modern robots are designed in such a way that they can load a lot of recorded dialogues, smart neural networks will somehow analyze it, artificial intelligence will make the right conclusions, and the result will be a humanoid robot, perhaps existing not in a physical body, but in voice and text channels. In fact, this is not the case, and all projects still require significant influence from experts, whose competence mainly depends on whether it will be pleasant to communicate with this robot, or whether communication with it will cause a persistent desire to switch to the operator.
It is very important that at the stage of preparation for the project and during implementation, the mandatory stages of the project are thoroughly worked out. For example, this requires:
- define the target set of dialog services to be automated;
- collect a relevant selection of existing dialogues. This will allow you to competently work out the structure of the future robot's work;
- understand how the communication on voice and text channels on the same topics differs;
- determine in which languages the robot should be able to communicate, and whether these languages will mix. This is especially true for Kazakhstan and Ukraine, where communication is often conducted in a mixture of languages;
- if the project intends to use solutions with neural network algorithms, correctly mark the samples for training;
- define the logic of transitions between different branches of the script;
- decide how dynamic the conversation script will be, which will determine how the robot will speak - in pre-recorded phrases or using a synthesized voice.
All this will allow you to avoid mistakes at the stage of choosing a platform and supplier and launch the service within a reasonable time.
To summarize this small excursion into the topic of building bots, then our recommendations are as follows:
- Set aside enough time to pre-work your project. More than once I met companies that wanted to make a decision in a week. The real time for normal project development is 2-3 months.
- Choose the technology platform carefully according to your needs. Read materials on specialized resources. Callcenterguru.ru, www.tadviser.ru , has a good selection of materials and recordings of webinars.
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- Understand that in any case, a robot is like a living organism that must constantly change along with the change in external factors, and it cannot be configured just once.
- Set aside time for testing right away: only by “running” the system on real dialogs many times, you can get a high-quality result.
If you follow these rules, then a high-quality and painless modernization of service services using robots becomes real and possible. And the robot will be happy to perform those same monotonous and routine tasks that people do not like to perform so much - without days off, without interruptions, without fatigue.