Who needs a chatbot?

Chatbot is gaining popularity among retail banking Apps. Almost all banks integrate a chatbot into online banking application, while whether the chatbot works properly is another matter. It’s still at infant stage — at least there is no substantial value a chatbot can bring to customers.

What’s the purpose of having a chatbot? Obviously appearing ‘High-Tech” shouldn’t be a proper one. Talking to human representatives via phone banking provides more clarity and efficiency of solving customer’s problems, provided a reasonably good customer service standard, which in no doubt implies high operational cost. On the other hand, most customer support requests should be common and straight forward, which don’t necessary require human involvement. As banks are moving all functionalities online, chatbot should be the strategic interactive interface with customers. We should lean towards “bot” functionality rather than “chat” — conversation proficiency isn’t the goal but solving customer’s problem is.

Chatbot should be the ideal interface for banking transactions. Customer can then get rid of hierarchical confusing menu. By inputting a sentence to chatbot, customer would see relevant control widget/ buttons for completing the desired transaction. In early days of internet there were navigation sites that list as much website URLs as possible, which are like a huge menu of internet website. They all disappeared when search engine emerged. In a sense chatbot should be the search engine of banking applications, but a more intelligent variation evolved from NLP, voice recognition, and AI technology. Google learns every aspect of its users’ behavior; a bank chatbot should too.

For those who don’t feel awkward talking to phone, voice assistance capability of chatbot shall be another valuable function. Think about “Alexa”. Which bank doesn’t want to bring the first banking “Alexa” to customers?

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