Conversational bots Archives - BotCore

Top use cases of Chatbots in the Banking and Finance Industry

Pradeep Tigulla — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 08:11:20 +0000

Top Use Cases of Chatbots in the Banking and Finance Industry

Chatbots have come a long way since the first time they were used by a banking application in 2015. With advancements in AI, NLP, and new communication channels like Google Home, Alexa, and social media platforms, they are now widely being used by almost all popular banks and financial institutions.

These ChatBots perform various repetitive tasks easily and accurately. Further, they can be personalized for each of the customers.

The conversational bots can be text-based or voice-based. They can be accessed from a mobile app, a banking website, social media messaging platforms, or voice-based personal digital assistants.

Generally, ChatBots used by banks are more popular in the finance and banking industry. However, chatbots are used for more complicated and personalized tasks beyond conventional uses.

Though as bank customers using digital services we all experience ChatBots, they are also used by employees working in financial institutions to retrieve information easily. When we go to a bank to learn more about a policy the employee retrieves information not from big bundles of paper on their desks, but rather from the organization’s memory using a ChatBot.

In 2017, Acuvate published a blog on top use cases of chatbots in the banking and finance industry. A lot has changed in these five years. They can guess the information we seek, suggest policies and initiatives, and are more convenient to use.

Here are 5 ways banks and financial institutions are using chatbots

1. Addressing Customer’s concerns

Unlike banking personnel, digital tools like websites are available for customers 24×7. To make it further easy for users, chatbots integrated into websites and mobile apps can answer the most common questions faster and with fewer clicks.

For example, reporting a hacking attempt, locking your account to stop a hacking attempt, or finding out more information about an unidentified debit would previously require the customer to log in to the website, search for the option, and take action. These are the most common tasks that a banking chatbot in the banking website or social media app can answer in just a few seconds. Since the app is on your mobile phone, verifying your credentials is easy. Here’s an example

The ambit of the operations a chatbot can perform has greatly widened these days with advancements in security systems and technologies. ChatBot interactions are now more personalized and natural.

2. Retaining old customers and expanding customer base

Customer engagement is beyond human interactions between customers and employees at the office. With more customers using digital tools like websites, apps embedded in mobile phones, and other personal digital assistants like Google Home or Alexa, each of these tools have ChatBots to answer customers and cater to their needs in time.

These tools simplify various processes and save time and effort. ChatBots are integral to all digital tools to engage with a large number of customers and provide personalized services. They define the quality of service and ease of operations a financial institution provides its customers.

For example, ChatBots identify new customers and present them with options of information they are more likely to seek. For older customers, ChatBots identify them, address them by their name, and with knowledge of their account details, they present a different set of actions for each of them. With advanced ChatBots, customers can’t say if they’re talking to a human or a digital assistant.

When embedded in IoT digital assistants like Alexa or Google Home, the latest advancements in NLP ( Natural Language Processing) technologies help the audio-based Chatbots provide a pleasant conversational experience to customers along with information they asked for and may be interested in.

3. Generating useful Marketing Leads

Modern ChatBots backed with Artificial Intelligence can build interest in a financial institution’s products and services. Chatbots are the perfect tools to implement digitalized marketing techniques to find new customers and sustain old ones. They are effective in keeping customers active by providing the convenience of being there for them always.

The ChatBots collect information from customers and provide them with information on various initiatives that are likely to interest them. This helps in identifying potential customers and in growing the customer base.

4. Recommendations and upselling

As the services of banking and financial institutions grew wider, it is important to let the right customers know about the right policies and initiatives. Intelligent digital systems like chatbots can more accurately identify interested customers. Chatbots make it easier to maintain customer profiles, identify who wants to buy other products, and get feedback on existing products and services.

Moreover, these Chatbots learn and adapt to situations. Hence they learn more about customers and get better and more accurate over time.

5. Personal Financial Assistant

Chatbots help users track their spending and receive a timely reminder of impending payments. Payments can be automated to avoid late fees. They do help customers refrain from overspending and provide regular reports of their expenses.

The information collected by chatbots can be used to profile customers based on their financial needs, status, and expenses. They especially make loan approvals and investment decisions easier and more manageable.

How to build the most reliable chatbots?

Chatbots reduce costs, no doubt, but that’s not the main advantage. They provide a better customer experience and make essential processes simpler. Every bank and the financial institution needs a chatbot.

However, these simple solutions are not so easy to build. As with any other financial system, since they involve sensitive information and must be error-free, they should be built with care and by trustable experts. Moreover, unlike physical assets, digital infrastructure like chatbots need to be updated continuously to address changing needs of customers and to stay relevant and competitive in the market.

BotCore - the powerful enterprise bot builder platform from Acuvate

Over the past few years, we have helped several enterprises build & launch bots to meet the needs of their employees, customers, and vendors. After observing several enterprise scenarios large landscape of user intents, and common pain points across various departments, we spent more than 15 person-years of research, design & development on building a highly flexible and powerful enterprise bot builder platform – “BotCore”.

BotCore is the perfect accelerator that enables banks and financial institutions to train, build, and launch customized conversational bots powered by artificial intelligence. Using “Cognitive Abstraction” it can leverage an AI service available today and are scalable for future services.

BotCore today powers chatbots at several Fortune 100 & large enterprises. To learn more about how Botcare can help your business in providing superior customer engagement, please mail us at

The post Top use cases of Chatbots in the Banking and Finance Industry appeared first on BotCore.

Optimize your customer support in this holiday season using customer engagement bots

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 12:25:00 +0000

Optimize your customer support in this holiday season using customer engagement bots

The holiday season is around the corner. With the festive cheer comes higher sales, more revenue, and significant work for the customer support teams of e-commerce businesses.

Increased demand for products leads to an influx of customer support requests. Coupled with employee shortage due to leaves and absenteeism during holidays, handling customer support during the festive season can be extremely challenging for contact center agents, leading to a drop in productivity and lower customer satisfaction (CSAT) levels.

Moreover, with the fear of catching COVID-19 reducing traffic to brick-and-mortar stores, online shopping will soar again this year, creating higher demand for e-commerce businesses and their support personnel. In 2020, U.S. consumers broke records of holiday shopping during Cyber 5, with online sales rising 20.6% year-over-year.

Holiday shopping isn’t the easiest. Sometimes, a customer may have an item in mind but cannot navigate the brand’s website to find it. At other times, customers may not be able to think of suitable gifting options. Or, they may want to know about the delivery status of items already bought.

Additionally, the business world has witnessed a paradigm shift in customer expectations over the past year, the most prominent being an increased demand for more convenient, personalized, and meaningful customer engagement.

Conversational AI and automation have emerged as the most vital trends in CX. Businesses have adopted AI-powered chatbots to deliver desirable and seamless omnichannel customer experiences that lead to hyper-personalized customer journeys, brand loyalty, and a competitive edge over other players in the market.

This blog talks about how brands in the e-commerce business can optimize customer support in this holiday season using customer support bots and AI-driven virtual assistants.

Optimize your customer support in this holiday season using AI chatbots for customer service

E-commerce brands perpetually witness a spike in demand around the holiday season. And with the fear of catching COVID-19 still looming in the air, online shopping will continue to grow even as in-store shopping begins reopening its doors.

Amidst such high demand, how can online brands create a foolproof strategy for holiday customer support? How can customer service chatbots help in this regard?

Let’s explore.

1. Help shoppers find the right products.

As discussed above, holiday shopping can be time-consuming and often tedious as consumers look for the perfect gift options.

A conversational AI bot can gather information about the tastes and preferences of the customer or ask questions about the intended recipient the customer wishes to buy a gift for and suggest suitable products.

At times, customers may tell the support chatbot what they are looking for, and the bot can throw up relevant search results.

Additionally, customer experience bots may assist visitors in navigating the website and inform them about seasonal offers, discounts, and product combos.

Marks and Spencer launched a Christmas Concierge chatbot to connect with customers during the festive season via Facebook Messenger. The chatbot allowed the brand to tailor product recommendations to the customers’ specific interests and needs – home, food, or both.

If the customer selected food, the bot asked specific questions about the type of food, dietary needs, etc. The bot then walked website visitors through menu options and allowed them to browse through recipes, request tips, and purchase directly from the recipe page.

2. Answer frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Businesses face their fair share of chaos during the peak holiday season. As customers rush to buy their favorite products and gifts, brands witness a substantial rise in queries.

In such a scenario, leveraging chatbots can take the burden off your support staff. Brands can automate some of the routine, mundane queries (for example, minimum order value for free delivery) by using AI chatbots. By analyzing and reviewing trends, patterns, and metrics from previous festive seasons, they can make a list of the most frequently asked questions and train the customer support bot to answer them.

Conversational AI keeps response times low, streamlines and optimizes the support process, and helps brands provide a seamless experience to customers.

3. Offer prompt round-the-clock support.

At times, customers may want to track the delivery status of their orders at 2 pm on a Sunday. Or, they may be shopping for products at 3 am and have related product queries.

Customers are always in a rush during the holiday season and want their questions answered as quickly as possible. Often, they resort to last-minute shopping, and if left waiting, they may get annoyed and visit a competitor’s website.

Moreover, customer support agents may be unavailable during holidays, leading to staff shortages at the contact center.

Fortunately, customer experience chatbots are always awake, don’t need holidays, and handle multiple customer queries 24X7X365 days a year.

4. Escalate irate customers to the human agents

There may be times when the bot is unable to answer customer queries, leading to customer frustration. Moreover, as the customers often rush and expect quick service, their chances of getting annoyed are much higher when questions remain unresolved.

AI-driven customer support chatbots can leverage sentiment analysis to comprehend customer emotion and route queries to a human agent to ensure a speedy and effective query resolution.

5. Drive lead generation and reduce cart abandonment with live chat triggers

Sometimes, customers may visit the brand’s website and find it challenging to locate the products they need. Or, they may add items to their cart but leave the website before checking out.

Bots integrated with live chat widgets can help brands onboard new customers, provide real-time responses, and personalize customer support, even when the agent isn’t available.

Moreover, such bots can recapture the interest of customers who may be trying to leave the website by throwing pop-up messages like “Flat 20% on order above $100 just for you.”

If the customer has left the website without buying the items in the cart, the bot may automatically generate and send an email saying, “We see you left something in your cart. Come back and get a 10% off on your purchase.”

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients deploy AI-powered customer experience chatbots to optimize customer support in the holiday season with our enterprise bot-building platform called BotCore.

With minimalistic coding requirements and pre-designed templates, BotCore allows organizations to implement customer-facing chatbots within weeks. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we leverage the best of Microsoft’s AI, ML, and NLP technologies to build chatbots that deliver highly personalized and frictionless customer interactions.

Moreover, our bots are multilingual and can cater to a global audience with English, French, Italian, German, and many more languages. Additionally, BotCore supports various platforms, including web, mobile app, and social media apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Additionally, we leverage Microsoft’s low-code bot-building solution, Power Virtual Agents (PVA), to help clients quickly build intelligent, conversational AI chatbots with little or no coding knowledge needed.

To know more about BotCore and Power Virtual Agents, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.

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