Chatbots: Is It A Frustrating Experience?

Several Founders, Co-Founders, CXO Bankers, CXO Fintech professional & people who participated in the ePanel discussions:

Mr. Mohammad Hassan, Project management expert
Mr. Rana Sinha Ray, Head Technology, TimesofMoney
Mr. Ramasubramanian S, Application, Transformation, Management and Operations Head, DXC Technology
Mr. Amit Gupta CTO, Canopy (Mesitis)
Mr. Aditya Pathak, Infrastructure consultant at IBM
Vikas R Panditrao, Co-Founder, Forum of Industry and Academic Knowledge Sharing (FIAKS)
Many other CEO/CXO Bankers & Fintech professionals on FIAKS Forum requested to remain anonymous

‘Chatbot’ have you heard about it? Well, you might have come across different kinds of chatbots on online websites. So first let’s check out What are chatbots and how do they work?

A chatbot is a software or merely a computer program that facilitates interaction with humans via messages or voice commands. The two basic types of modern chatbots include Rule-based chatbots that can respond to specific commands only and Artificial intelligence chatbots that respond to natural language. For instance, any user can type his query and the chatbot responds instantly through the message and thus helps users to easily explore a particular website. These chatbots use Machine Learning, AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand people and thereby

FIAKS community discussion was majorly focusing on the following questions:

Question 1: How useful are chatbots for financial inclusion?

Business leaders saved an average of $300,000 in 2019 from their chatbots, with the greatest impact occurring across support and sales teams; the sales function is the most common use case for chatbots (41%), followed closely by support (37%) and marketing (17%); chatbots increased sales by an average of 67%, with 26% of all sales starting through a chatbot interaction; 35% of business leaders said chatbots helped them close sales deals; top automated tasks performed by chatbots are routing website visitors, collecting information, and qualifying leads; chatbots speed up response times by an average of 4x and increase customer support satisfaction scores by 24% ^[1]
Thereupon the above post a community member raised a very crucial question- “For saving USD 300,000 how are digital banking heads justifying payouts of such large sum of money to Chatbot companies?” Isn’t the amount spent by banks on such a technology initiative more than USD 300,000?
Well, the cost definitely is huge but all benefits can’t be quantified, imagine the training costs alone, also with AI still adding to the learning the savings should not be the matrix to go by, over years there will definitely be a significant reduction across hiring, training and resource costs. Again not to mention intangibles like customer satisfaction. Most of the clients are more inclined towards connecting to the chatbots due to their 24*7 availability.
All MNC banks work on a concept of green channel time, automating backend processes bringing in AI, etc will increase the time bank/bank staff get to sell products to customers – thereby increasing profitability.
Chatbots can be easily integrated with many financial products to impact customer care and customer support. Chatbots can directly impact the following and ultimately help in more financial inclusion
- Getting information about businesses and organizations
- Finding financial services
- Checking account balances
- Finding a credit card
- Managing payments and transfers
- Checking credit score
- Tracking expenses
- Filing taxes
Another community member added that domain-specific, special purposes chatbot is not hard to create. He mentioned that he had built a chatbot past in time, which enabled to replace about 73% of the support function by it with less than 8 months of effort.