Uniting technology and humans is the key to increasing profit for financial institutions
*By Julián Colombo
When we talk about improving customer experience, digital transformation and artificial intelligence are increasingly important for companies. And due to the need for speed and communication, especially in the financial industry, there is a trend towards the adoption of conversational software, better known as chatbot. However, this type of conversation only has a chance of success when the system is extraordinarily intelligent or when a human who, through technological solutions, has access to information, a 360º view of the situation and a certain empowerment to make decisions. And in this way it is possible to deliver, in fact, greater value to customers and guarantee their satisfaction.
Companies that use chatbots consider the reduction of costs with people in their call center and improvements in the speed of resolution of complaints. Recently, a survey by MIT Technology Review and Genesys, showed that approximately 90% of business executives surveyed reported improvements in these solutions. However, this logic is somewhat controversial, as many customers are so frustrated that they leave the conversation in the middle, which leads the system to analyze the overall situation as positive.
Another point is that these evaluations usually do not have adjusted statistical distributions. For example, we cannot take into account all the calls, saying that 95% of them – who went to ask the account balance – had a positive rating while only 5% were negative, and this portion refers to the resolution of problems that were not effective. In this case, it is necessary to separate the reasons and understand that these 5%, in fact, indicate that 100% of the evaluations of care in complex cases were negative.
The Google Cloud Finfacts report, which analyzed 24 financial institutions, showed that 15 of them had poor ratings of the chatbot experience, as the program leaves the user in the lurch and does not offer alternatives. The problem here is twofold. The first one is technical, as none of them are perfect. The second is emotional, as the experience leads the customer to feel that they are not valuable enough to talk to a human and feel diminished for not having their questions or problems truly heard.
Of course, having a human service does not mean that this issue will be solved, since it is necessary to have people trained and assisted by functional service platforms that meet daily demands in an optimized way. Finfacts also revealed that 11 of the 24 institutions analyzed were ineffective during human care. When we need to solve something, we want easy and agile answers and if the attendant is not prepared to help, it is useless.
Today, having dissatisfied customers is a big problem for organizations. Open Finance, which has contributed a lot to the competitiveness of the sector, makes the decision of users to change institutions easier. If four years ago banks and fintechs went through a process of digitization and the end of humans, currently those with the greatest chance of profitability are those that are turning to people, where they not only stay to listen to a request, but also have the power to make a decision.
The ideal scenario is to start with a self-service that goes through the chatbot with NLP (Natural Language Processing) and ends with a perfectly trained human with decision-making authority. We have integrated technologies that offer tools that work together to achieve an optimal balance in companies and a customizable platform that specifically meets each of these companies’ needs and new demands. Never has the good use of these technologies been such a decisive factor in the performance of financial institutions.
Solving a problem, especially with human support, creates business opportunities. Customers give a higher rating to a company that solved their problem on the spot. This not only generates greater loyalty, but also more opportunity to cross sell, even as an immediate result of the same interaction. Rediscovering the value of people as a generator of positive results is fundamental to the success of organizations.
*Julián Colombo is an economist with more than 20 years of career in banking, he is also co-founder and CEO of N5, a software company dedicated to digital transformation in the financial sector.
