While ecommerce was the first industry to embrace automation, financial services are swiftly catching up. Our 2023 customer service trends research found that the adoption of AI automation by financial services companies increased by 63% in 2022. And this trend looks set to continue.
It’s not surprising that fintechs are taking to automation like ducks to water. With a shared focus on speed and convenience, AI chatbots and fintech go hand in hand. According to Juniper, mobile banking apps will be the dominant channel for IVA-driven customer communications in 2023 — accounting for 79% of successful interactions.
But AI can do so much more than enabling conversations between bots and people. Repetitive, manual admin tasks are ripe for automating.
Here’s where process automation comes in.
What is process automation?
Behind-the-scenes support is what keeps your contact center show on the road. For finserv companies, automating these background processes (like hunting down transaction details, verifying users, and routing requests to the right department) is essential to providing your customers with faster, better CX.
Previously, customer service automation meant chat automation: software that allows humans to interact with computers in a conversational way. AI chatbots can be used to answer FAQs and solve simple requests. When 75% of customers expect help within 5 minutes of making a request, chat automation is instrumental in being able to meet this expectation of speedy support.
But automation doesn’t start and end with chat — especially for finserv companies, where processes might be more complex and customer expectations even higher (you’re dealing with their hard earned cash, after all). That’s why forward-thinking fintechs are waking up to the benefits of process automation.
“Brands who have already automated behind-the-scenes processes are reaping the rewards. They’re seeing efficiency gains, streamlined operations, and faster customer resolutions at lower cost.”
Reetu Kainulainen, CEO & Co-founder, Ultimate
According to our in-house market research, 20% of business leaders say improving operational efficiency is their top priority for this year. And they’re turning to process automation to achieve this goal.
What are the business benefits of finance process automation?
Repetitive, manual admin tasks are ripe for automating. Not only does this provide customers with a better experience — it also saves agents’ time. And as we all know, time is money.
“Companies are looking to do more with the same amount of agents and relieve the pressure on those agents, so they can be more cost effective in managing their support centers.”
Jon Ross, VP of Product, Messaging at Zendesk
Here are some of the benefits you can expect to see with finance process automation:
- Increased productivity by pre-populating tickets with info like transaction number or customer email address to reduce agent effort
- Instant resolutions to simple queries (like password resets) without any human involvement — allowing your team to manage increased volumes without adding headcount and providing better CX
- Lower Average Handle Time (AHT) by routing tickets to the right support rep and department
- Greater agent satisfaction: use AI to perform tedious repetitive tasks and free up your support team so they have more time to tackle complex cases that involve their strategic and problem-solving skills
To help you automate your behind-the-scenes support, we’ve put together 5 tips and tricks for finance process automation that deliver on both efficiency and CX goals.
More on AI-powered automation
1. Avoid manually requesting information
One of the most important automation best practices is avoiding asking for details that you have stored somewhere in your systems. To achieve this, make sure you have a fully integrated tech stack — with both backend and CRM integrations.
A seamless integration means you don’t have to request details from customers but can instead pull information automatically (like whether they are logged in or not, their location and language preferences, previous account history, and more).
Not only does this provide a more personalized experience for customers, but allows support teams to provide faster support too. Plus, it makes agents’ lives easier because they don’t have to switch between tools or copy-paste customer details, which can lead to mistakes with data entry.
2. Implement smart triage and escalations
In some cases — especially for more complex requests — you might need customers to provide additional information to be able to come to a resolution. With a virtual agent on board, you can automatically gather these details up front before escalating to an agent.
This reduces back-and-forth communication between customers and your support team and means agents can solve issues faster.
3. Automatically verify customers
When handling sensitive data, customer verification is an essential part of the support process. International money transfer provider we work with, TransferGo, often receives requests from customers about the status of a specific transfer.
Instead of asking users to login to their account in order to see the real-time status, they automatically verify customers by asking a series of authentication questions before handing out sensitive information.
At Ultimate we take security seriously — check out our security and privacy policies here.
4. Set up automatic routing
One of the biggest barriers to providing speedy support is customer queries ending up in the wrong place. A simple way to solve this is by using AI automation to identify the intent (the meaning behind their question, like “account login issue” or “blocked card”) of a message and route it to the correct department.
For example if a customer has a question about renewing their contact, that can go straight to renewals. Or if someone is asking how to close their account, with automation you can make sure this query lands directly in your retention department’s inbox.
As well as routing, you can use process automation to fully resolve simple ticket requests. Pockit, a digital financial services brand we work with, was faced with a 17,000 email backlog when they reached out to us at Ultimate. This huge backlog was the fallout from a forced two-month hiatus on all transactions due to complications with a third-party supplier.
“In just two months, we were able to reduce about 95% of our support ticket backlog. We also reduced our response time from weeks to under two days, thanks to Ultimate’s ticket automation.”
Jamie Hopper, Customer Service Manager, Pockit
And today, they're automating 12,000 emails each month with Ultimate's solution. You can read Pockit’s success story here.
5. Use generative AI
Generative AI (the technology powering ChatGPT) is shaking up the world of support. While this technology is still very new, there are a couple of ways we see gen AI being used to make process automation more efficient.
See how we’ve built the groundbreaking tech behind ChatGPT into our product.
- Build a bot in minutes: Instead of manually building out dialogue flows, connecting an LLM-powered bot to your knowledge base allows you to start automatically answering FAQs in next to no time.
- Structuring tickets: Use LLMs to structure, summarize and auto-populate tickets, as well as predicting categories, so your human agents don't have to.
- Adjusting tone of voice: Prompt your LLM to transform factual replies to customer requests into a specific tone of voice to keep replies 100% on-brand.
Follow our Humanized AI series to learn more about gen AI use cases.
When it comes to their money, customers want near-instant resolutions. But this desire for speedy support can be undermined by the complexity of financial services and the need to keep private customer data secure. That's why process automation holds the power to revolutionize the world of financial services.
Already it's helping businesses to drive efficiency and increase productivity — allowing brands to work smarter, not harder. And as AI technology continues to advance and mature, so will the use cases in fintech customer support.