Chatbot-a game changer for customer care services
In days gone by, the appearance of an average office in a bank is characterised by pile of files hugely stacked and the banking hall, filled with restless customers on a long queue, waiting to be attended to by the cashiers that are usually overworked as they manually carryout their tasks that are highly error-prone. A simple task of opening a bank account required a customer to travel far distance to the bank to physically provide his data (not forgetting large number of customers waiting for similar transaction). You can’t even make withdrawals at other branches or get your debit card except at the branch where your account was opened (was there even an ATM decades ago).
Internet banking came and changed the face of the banking system. The pile of files reduced and the endless queues gradually thinned out, although they still exist, but void of the stresses and bitterness of the pre-internet banking era. Customers still need to come to the bank for some transactions, Cashiers and Customer Care services still struggle to keep up with the endless queues and queries that require their attention.
Modern banking era is now characterised by the introduction, adoption and integration of Chatbots (a form of dialogue system). A common Chatbot’s use case is customer service. The overworked and overloaded human customer care agent is being substituted by an automated computer algorithm/model that takes care of the need of customers. When deployed, bots are capable of taking queries and attending to issues, providing timely and relevant answers, without human intervention. An interesting part is that you don’t have to be physically present as a customer to make use of this service. Customers can log into the bank’s platform and access the bots from the comfort of their homes using their computers or mobile devices. This saves a lot of stress involved in traveling far distances to the bank only to meet long queues, with little or no guarantee of having a satisfied and fulfilled day.
The emergence of bots is a game-changer for the banking ecosystem. This is evident in a more appealing banking outlook and positive customer feedback. Endless queues are almost non-existent and issues are being promptly attended to, helping banking staff channel their energies towards other pressing matters that requires stronger human presence and increasing the productivity and revenue of the bank as a whole.
Other financial and commercial sectors are leveraging the benefits and huge potentials of bots by adopting and integrating them into their customer care package. Two organisations are worth appraising in this regard:
Proto is one of the leading AICX organisations championing the cause of Chatbots in the financial and commercial sectors as seen in the recently launched free COVID-19 awareness Chatbots to Global South healthcare services.
Facebook is a giant empire that is a huge backbone and support for research and innovation in dialogue systems, amongst numerous researches they conduct. Facebook’s ParlAI, is a unified platform, implemented in Python, for training and evaluating AI models on a variety of openly available dialogue datasets using open-sourced learning agents. With this free support of Facebook and the ParlAI team, numerous models and datasets have been created that has brought revolution to Chatbots especially in areas that relate to bias, ethics, privacy and safety of Chatbot’s usage.
A huge revolution is experienced in the financial and commercial sectors, especially the banking community, which is evident in the transformation to a new, improved and efficient modern banking as compared to the old, traditional and inefficient system that left customers short of being satisfied whenever they go for transactions. The somber and unsatisfied looks on the faces of customers in banking halls have been substituted with a happy and satisfied countenance. Thank you, Chatbots!
Further Reading
Curtis Matlock (2020): Proto provides free COVID-19 awareness chatbots to Global South healthcare services
Emily Dinan et. al (2020): Recipes for Safety in Open-domain Chatbots
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About the Author
Tunde Ajayi is a student of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) Ghana, a beneficiary of the Google-Facebook, fully funded, African Masters of Machine Intelligence (AMMI) 2019/2020 scholarship. His research focus is on dialogue systems, with a goal of making Chatbots not only think like humans, but feel like humans.
