Advances in technologies, from AI to IoT and Cloud, have led to customer interaction and channel preferences to the next level. Today, customer expectations, in the banking sector, are increasing rapidly and they now look for more personalized and instant offerings from companies. Thus, there is a need to endeavor to meet and consolidate customer satisfaction and foster customer advocacy through innovative and advanced technology.

Conversational banking means a lot in modern banking as it can lead to dialogue and create a robust relationship between financial institutions and customers. According to a recent Accenture report, banks need a paradigm shift in their communication strategies to converse with their digital customers. By making use of Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) that integrates messaging, text, and voice, banks can deliver innovative services to build a seamless relationship with customers.

Why Conversational Banking is So Important?

Financial institutions have come a long way since the disruption caused by the Internet that paved new ways of online banking and mobile banking. However, with the rise in customer expectations, banks across the world seek technology that can manage this rapid change in customer expectations. The advent of chatbots here gained lots of friction by financial organizations as it mimics human agents and solves customer queries by responding quickly. Customers recognize the value chatbots bring and there is a growing demand for them in modern banking.

However, with innovations in cutting-edge technologies, Conversational User Interfaces started to emerge and banks are increasingly adopting them that have led modern banking towards conversational banking. Industry experts define conversational banking as a two-way interface between a customer and a bank, where a conversation can be initiated by either participant through a voice, text or visual interface.

As the banking industry nowadays is struggling with various issues, be it the growing Internet and mobile banking saturation, increasing demand for personal interactions, or difficulty in managing branch networks, the evolution of conversational channels are offering a feasible solution for these challenges.

Considering reports, conversational banking will be a more affordable way to interact with customers for banks in years to come. It will be easier to deploy and maintain and can digitalize and integrate processes in several ways.

This bi-directional interface is highly unique and able to offer a number of significant benefits to banks over other channels, both assisted and self-service. It can be delivered in a number of ways, including SMS text, Chatbots, and voice assistants.

This conversational interface also offers greater customer convenience as it has the accessibility of voice assistants. The channels of conversation in terms of banking services promise to consolidate interactions with the power of automation that can meet areas like marketing, transactions, customer support, financial advice, among other areas.