The banking industry has started leveraging AIOps capabilities to fuel its digital transformation journey. The banking industry has endured many changes to be where it is today. There are no long queues in physical banks for making simple transactions. People can now initiate a transfer with some taps on their smartphones. One of the latest innovations in the banking industry is the use of virtual assistants for customers. Virtual assistants not only improve the customer experience but also save time for bank representatives. Read on to apprehend how virtual assistants lend a better experience to banking customers.

Understanding the role of virtual assistants in the banking industry

Most of us would have come across a voice-enabled assistant while using smartphones. Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are some examples of virtual assistants for smartphones. We can use these assistants to play music, set alarms, make calls, perform basic Internet searches, and set appointments. Users give a voice command to these assistants and ask them to complete a task. Similarly, virtual assistants in banking can complete several tasks for customers. With the evolution of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and related technologies, virtual assistants are now performing complex banking tasks.

Some banking tasks performed by virtual assistants are as follows:

• Make payments and online transfers
• Activate credit/debit cards
• Reset banking passwords
• Generate alerts for upcoming payments
• Handle basic customer queries
• Display available bank balance
• Generate dispute tickets

Besides the aforementioned use cases, there are many other uses of virtual assistants. A virtual assistant can offer insights into where the money goes. It can convey info regarding past payments, changes in the credit score, weekly spending, and more. With the help of conversational AI, ML, speech recognition, and a few other technologies, virtual assistants can do more than just converse with the customer. Banks can also boost their service availability with the help of virtual assistants. With virtual assistants, banking services are right at the fingertips of customers. When banking services are easily available to customers, service availability will augment.

Understanding the dissimilarity between virtual assistants and chatbots

Both virtual assistant and chatbot functionalities are provided by the AIOps providers. Both terms are often used interchangeably in the banking industry. However, there are slight dissimilarities between chatbots and virtual assistants. Chatbots are a straightforward solution for customer support in the banking industry. Often, one can find pop-up screens on bank websites that can interact. These chatbots can understand the text and can reply via text only. They can help provide solutions for some basic banking queries.

Virtual assistants are the next step in the banking industry. Voice-based assistants are more powerful than chatbots and perform complex tasks. With AI-powered voice recognition, they can offer a personalized banking experience to each customer. Virtual assistants in the banking industry are a perfect blend of mobile banking and Fintech applications. Virtual assistants aren’t limited to listening voice commands of customers. In many cases, virtual assistants can converse with banking customers.

How do virtual assistants augment the customer experience?

Virtual assistants are augmenting the customer experience for banking customers in many ways. Even though the technology is in development, it is already benefiting banks and other financial institutions around the world. How virtual assistants boost the customer experience in the banking sector is as follows:

Advanced banking insights

How will you check the recurring charges on your debit card? You will use the fintech application installed on your smartphone and manually check for recurring payments. With a virtual assistant, one can monitor recurring transactions with a simple voice command. Virtual assistants keep a tab on customer transactions and provide advanced banking insights. Some examples of queries answerable by virtual assistants are:

• How many times have I shopped with a {merchant name} in the last month?
• How much did I spend at a {store name} in the last week?
• What is the account balance trend for the past week?
• What is my current credit utilization ratio?

With advanced banking insights, banking customers can learn more about money management. Customers don’t have to call a bank representative to know more about their balance trends. They can simply command the voice assistant to tell the balance trend.

Personalized banking experience

Most digital transformation services and solutions offered by AIOps providers focus on offering a personalized experience to customers. Similarly, a virtual assistant can boost personalization in the banking industry. Banks tend to have many trusted customers. Can banking representatives offer tailor-made services to each customer? The answer is clearly no because bank reps have to deal with a huge number of customers. While dealing with many customers concurrently, bank reps cannot devise tailor-made solutions.

With the rise of digitization, banking customers demand more personalized services. Banks cannot dedicate a single employee to only a few customers to boost personalization. They can accomplish so by deploying virtual assistants on online channels used by the customers. Virtual assistants can answer each customer by their name and offer personalized responses. Every customer will feel special when virtual assistants are on their toes to answer their queries.

Fraud prevention

Banking customers demand security, especially credit card users. Often, customers complain to bank reps regarding unauthorized transactions or suspicious activity. Bank reps have to spend several hours cross-checking suspicious activity. All this can be prevented by informing the customer early about suspicious activity. Many financial institutions have developed virtual assistants that offer real-time alerts to the customer.

With automated alerts, banking customers will know about an unauthorized transaction in real-time. One can know about duplicate transactions, large tips, or possible fraud with virtual assistants. All this will happen without manual interference from the bank representatives. It will enrich the experience for customers, and they will think their money is in safe hands. Not to forget, banking customers will also practice self-care with virtual assistants. Virtual assistants have already brought a revolution in the banking industry and will only become more powerful in the future. Explore virtual assistants and other AIOps capabilities to heighten the digital banking experience for your customers!