Co-authored by: Tanmoy Bhattacharjee
The generally used term “banking hours” has lost its relevance these days. It’s because banking is as much impacted by hyper-consumerism as any other business. Therefore, it requires banks to be always available to support banking needs. A customer may spring to make a transaction after receiving a payment reminder SMS late in the evening or proceed to invest in a stock tip received from his broker while casually browsing emails.
Why does experience matter in banking? Was it not about safety and returns earlier?
The digital banking experience associated with such innocuous transactions is a baseline expectation from the consumers of today. But behind the scenes, a bank has to be on its toes to provide anytime-anywhere banking to its users. At first, the bank must be present at as many channels and mediums in the digital world as where the bank’s customers spend time. This includes social media (Instagram, Facebook are typical places where people spend most of their leisure time), e-commerce sites, messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Twitter, and online streaming entertainment sites such as YouTube. The consumer can come for a banking need from any of these channels and more such places in the digital world and expect instantaneous service.
The banking websites are always available, and the mobile apps of the banks are pushed to all their customers’ smartphones through aggressive campaigns. However, a customer may need some handholding, or worse, an immediate solution if they are facing a problem while performing a banking transaction. This is where digital assistants take over to assist the unhappy customer right at that moment.
Is there value to engage proactively with customers or just serve them well when they request for it? Is it possible with each customer?
The answer is yes. It was a good start to provide a multi-channel experience to your customers earlier. But now, the personalized service quotient can be greatly enhanced if your digital assistant is able to engage the customer “proactively” before the customer initiates engagement from their side. The experience is further elevated when the digital assistant converses in a natural way via text or speech. Such a personalized experience would be cost-prohibitive and less satisfactory if done with a traditional customer service setup manned by agents or self-service tools that get activated only when the customer comes calling.
So, what is Ziva?
HCLTech’s Ziva is an intelligent banking assistant, which provides natural language driven conversational banking experience on demand. Ziva is an Omni-Channel solution and offers standardized conversational AI-based self-service across voice, chat, mobile, and social channels. Customers can engage using text or voice, written, or spoken in natural language.
Not just an ordinary bot, Ziva comes prebuilt with a repository of utterances for banking self-service options such as Accounts, Balance, Payments, Eligibility, Cards and so on. Ziva supports multi-language capabilities and offers a business-friendly UI to configure next best actions (NBA) and fallback mechanisms. This helps banks to jumpstart on the journey of offering a hyper-personalized, anywhere-anytime digital banking experience to their customers at affordable costs.
As a Conversational AI enabled experience solution, Ziva integrates into HCLTech’s NOVUS Banking platform. This digital banking platform is a framework for obtaining business services from a set of best-fit cloud-native API-architected solutions, that are integrated by means of a flexible orchestration layer to deliver excellently executed customer journeys. The platform also integrates with external data sources, including open banking feeds, and leverages analytics-driven insight on that data, to offer holistic multi-bank relationship views and hyper-personalized solutions (like personal financial management) based on such views. Finally, leveraging industry-leading design thinking practices, NOVUS offers the best customer experience through interactive and configurable web and mobile interfaces.
To learn more about how HCLTech can help you with Banking 4.0 Transformation, download the Ziva Product Brochure. You can also read about Ziva on “How to Accelerate the Bank 4.0 Journey with the HCLTech Total Experience Suite on AWS”
To know more about the HCLTech Contact Center Suite, visit HCLTech’s Fluid Contact Center or write to us at Contact.FluidCC@hcl.com.
