How to drive AI at scale to transform the financial services customer experience
Executive summary
Financial services firms are accelerating the adoption of AI for customer interactions
Financial services firms understand the importance of making customer interactions AI-enabled and are taking steps to achieve this goal. The use of AI in customer interactions has grown significantly in the past three years in the industry. A number of leading financial services firms are responding to this demand with innovative solutions.
However, half of banking and insurance customers
(49%) feel that the value they received from their AI interactions was non-existent or less than expected. This perhaps reflects the fact that the novelty factor of traditional industry innovations – such as basic chatbots – may have worn off. Today, people expect chatbots to be as advanced as those available from technology firms such as Google, and today only 31% say chatbots are their preferred AI-driven way to interact with financial services institutions compared to 41% for voice assistants.
Organizations derive significant benefits from AI’s use in customer interactions
While AI has not lived up to customers’ expectations, it offers a range of benefits for banks and insurers. Financial services firms have reduced their cost of operations by 13% and have increased the revenue per customer by 10% after deploying AI in customer-facing functions. One example is the AI-powered recommendation engine “ADA” (algorithmic decision agent), from Aviva which ranks the products that customers are most likely to buy.1
The industry comes last when it comes to scaling of AI-based customer interactions
While the level of organizational benefits from AI-enabled interactions is one of the highest for this industry compared to other sectors, financial services performs worst in terms of achieving scaled implementation of AI solutions. The top challenges standing in the way of achieving scale are: leadership and organizational resistance; difficulty in identifying the right use cases to scale; the long gestation periods for implementation, coupled with lack of data management; and lack of trust for high-priced interactions.
Multiple factors are critical to accelerating AI use cases to scale
Drawing on this research, best practice examples, and our own experience working with clients on these issues, we have outlined six recommendations for achieving scale with AI:
• Invest in value-driven AI to transform the customer experience
• Create trust-based and ethical AI governance approaches to drive broad-based customer adoption
• Deliver an AI experience that takes into account
“signature moments” that require empathy and emotion
• Set up the technology foundation required for an AI-enabled customer engagement
• Put in place senior leadership roles for AI to accelerate adoption
• Educate customers on what AI can do for them and make AI systems explainable and transparent.