Listen: Deploying AI-based chatbots at community FIs

Community banks can contend with their larger counterparts by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots to improve both customer experience and internal efficiencies. Virtual assistants save valuable time and resources by routing customers to the appropriate digital channels based on their inquiries, Murali Mahalingam, senior vice president of AI business at Eltropy , tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. “The cost of deploying chatbots and voice bots have tremendously reduced, and now the field is level,” Mahalingam says. “Whether you are a smaller institution or a larger bank, the kind of technology and the variety of channels that is available to consumers is pretty fixed. It is shaping up that the big banks and the small institutions are level with a similar technology.” Listen as Mahalingam discusses how community banks can implement and deploy virtual assistants using AI-based technologies. 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Subscribe to The Buzz Podcast on iTunes , Spotify , Google podcasts , or download the episode . The following is a transcript generated by AI technology that has been lightly edited but still contains errors. Brian Stone 0:02 Hello, and welcome to The Buzz, a bank automation news podcast. My name is Brian stone and I'm the Associate Editor at Bank automation news. Joining me today is Murali Mahalingam, senior vice president. In this edition Murali discusses how virtual assistants can be used by community financial institutions to great effect, what the implementation process looks like, and how this technology could help smaller banks compete with their larger counterparts. What benefits do you think that community financial institutions have by employing virtual assistants?Murali Mahalingam 0:37 So, there are several benefits as such, you know, so, at a high level, what is going on in the credit union industry is not there are multiple forces that are in effect that directly impact member experience, right. So, if I'll get to the member experience as a core benefit of using virtual agents and so on, but, so, demographic changes, you know, millennials are shaping the way the financial services and banking engagements happen. And there are some economic factors with all the inflation inflationary talks, consumers are evaluating financial decisions and so on. And then this whole come across three different pillars, one is about digitization, what kind of benefits financial institutions are deriving from, from LPs, the enterprise class digital platform that includes virtual agents, and virtual assistants, and so on. So, so digital is one of the pillars where by opening newer channels are opening almost all the channels possible where your consumers are going to come in from like text, chat, voice, video, co browsing, screen sharing social, and so many other channels, that's a great benefit for for a consumer to have a seamless access to all these communication channels, that's number one. And from from institution perspective, to now the contact center agents are able to engage with the members where they are at, and in the channel of their choice. So that is increasing more accessibility. That's a interesting benefit there. And the second pillar is around automation. So once you have all these channels opened up, how do you differentiate high high volume low value requests that are coming on these channels versus high value, low volume kind of requests that come in? So how do you look at these call volumes or contact volumes, and then see how what part of it can be self service by the consumers and what powerful part of it can be automated so the automation as a pillar generates a lot of these benefits around, no cost effective way of servicing your member requests, Omni channel experiences, and also self service capabilities. Third is around the third pillar is around intelligence. So once these communication channels are automated, through AI, there is going to be a lot of conversational data that will be collected through conversations on text and chat and voice and video. So what do you do with all the all the data so that's where the intelligence pillar device that provides a benefits around actionable insights to the contact center supervisors and operators and also understanding the member or the consumer behavior and their needs, to the extent of an understanding their sentiment, mood, and the tone in which they are interacting, and also their specific topics for which they are calling into the contact center. So you get to learn more about your consumers, their needs and their behaviors. So these are some of the benefits at a high level across digital digitization, automation and intelligence. Brian Stone 4:18 So I have a two part question for you. Number one, with with specifically on these community financial institutions, how do you think what do you think the best method is for implementing this technology? And number two, what is the roadmap look like for implementation? So, Murali Mahalingam 4:38 depending on where the financial institution is in the digital journey, because different institutions are at different points in their journey, so they are looking at the levers, you know, am I trying to look for optimizing my contact center operation? Do I have Problem of call abandonment. Do I have a problem of employee attrition? Or do I have problem of, you know, a member experience from accessibility to these chat channels. So depending on where they are in their digital journey, the roadmap is designed. So, it takes the first set of effort is to really level set and understand at the institution level, you know, where exactly what is the call distribution like why are members or consumers calling and are they trying to get some transactions closed or an acquisition related information and so on. So anyway, so that is the first step of this whole implementation process. What we have seen is customers generally start with the most impactful channel, which is voice. Today, about 68% of consumer calls happen through voice voice is still the preferred medium. So intelligent virtual agent, which is our AI, that is, a bot that automates a lot of the incoming contact requests is something that our customers are looking at to deploy and automate and address 30 to 40% of the voice calls that come into the contact center queue. So I VA for voice, integer virtual agent for voice the first one. And then the way LP has designed the AI is you write one AI that understands the consumers intent. And then we automate that as a workflow across all channels. So you write AI once, and then it is immediately available for all channels, which means once you automate IVF, for wise, then you go on to IVF, or chat without disrupting any of the workflows and the ai, ai continues to work for chat. And then we have a powerful feature, which is a differentiated feature where we deflect incoming calls to a text as a channel. So this is the third step, which is, if I'm talking to someone on a call, I'm one on one basis, and my time is held by the call volumes, the call center. But if I'm able to deflect that incoming call to a text, an agent, a single agent can serve as eight different text based communication or text requests at a time. So you get one is to eight ratio. So So IVR for voice is the first step, and then moving on to chat, text, and then the video. So that's sort of what I have seen as a progression of how customers implement. Brian Stone 7:45 And next question is, how do how do you bring together sort of where we've been in the space of assisting customers with banking to now use of these virtual assistants? Because, you know, older customers are typically more hesitant to change and are more, you know, always wanting to speak to a human versus use an AI or something along those lines. So how do you reconcile those two things. Murali Mahalingam 8:12 And what we have seen is the old channels never go away. People do like to walk into a branch and have a conversation. So some channel channels don't go away. It's just as the demographic changes, like I said earlier, millennials, they are digital natives. They would love to live in the digital medium. They don't want to step into a branch. But you're back to your point of how do you retain the traditional member experiences, yet offer a digital presence to newer members or different preferences. So see, the way the way LP LPS framework is designed this again, this is an industry's first way of looking at credit union from a unified solutions framework standpoint. So we are the only company that offers a unified solution framework where we support the communication channels, from in branch to virtual branches, to text and chat and voice and video that we talked about cobrowse and so on. So we have automation and intelligence built on this unified solutions framework. So so any conversation that a consumer would initiate from a branch, and then let's just say the conversation shifts to a chat to a voice, we keep track of the whole conversation, context, and the whole breadcrumb of how the information flows. Right. So so that is something that we provide as a seamless experience for for the consumers to switch between channels. So we continue to support traditional channels. We support newer channels and the channel of choice. That's it. Brian Stone 9:53 How do you think these virtual assistants will help the smaller banks and financial institutions To compete with, say, their larger competitors, like the Bank of America, or the truest sense of the world. Murali Mahalingam 10:06 So I think the large banks were the early movers. So their cost of innovation was much, much higher. So with the drop in the compute power of AI, you know, AI can do a lot more compute in from a unit cost standpoint. And so the cost of deploying chatbots and voice bots have tremendously reduced. Now the field is level. So whether you are a smaller institution or a larger bank, the kind of technology and the variety of channels that is available to consumers is pretty fixed. Right? Yes, as you know, there are certain complex, low volume highly complex queries that a large institutions may address. But if I'm a smaller bank, I get my ROI of automating 60% of my incoming calls at the same or lower price point and a big bank and not worry so much about the remaining 40% That can be handled through high touch branch field agents. So that's how it is. It is shaping up you know, the big banks and the small institutions are leveled with a similar technologies. Brian Stone 11:31 You've been listening to the buzz, a bank automation news podcast, please follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. And as a reminder, you can rate this podcast on your platform of choice. Thank you for your time, and be sure to visit us at Bank automation news.com

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