The boom of FinTech in the past decade has been impressive, culminating in a stellar 2021 for the industry which saw FinTech startups raise three times the amount than it did the year before within just the first 9 months of the year. 

While investments are unlikely to reach the levels they had in previous years in 2022, the industry still has plenty of room for growth, especially when it comes to user acquisition, as more consumers and merchants are moving towards digitalising their financial interactions in their daily lives and get exposed to a more diverse suite of personal finance products.

As millions of new users continue to adopt new digital financial services, financial institutions have turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline their operations and growth. 

Customer experience (CX) has proved to be one of the most effective applications of AI and automation. While chatbots and interactive voice response (IVRs) have traditionally been relied on to facilitate customer conversations, these tools have their shortcomings.  Notably, most of them fall short of delivering a seamless user experience, with an interface that is often confusing.

Ultimately, despite the push toward customer portals and online helpdesks, research has also shown that over 70% of consumers still prefer using the phone to reach out to customer service agents. 

With the fintech space being a competitive one, it is important that FSIs and fintech platforms set themselves apart from others in order to retain customers and build up their brand experience. How then can businesses optimise their services and provide customers with excellent service at the same time? 

Enter Voice AI — a game-changer for the FSI industry. Over the years, AI has advanced enough to be aware of conversational context, and understand user intent and sentiment, allowing voice AI assistants to become pivotal in how businesses serve customers.   

By utilising voice AI technology with advanced natural language processing and machine learning capabilities, firms in the financial service industry are able to provide more efficient customer service as well as streamline and scale their business operations. Here are three ways that Voice AI can help financial institutions:

1. Automate high-volume calls such as verification or reminder calls

FSIs and fintech platforms handle millions of transactions every day, whether it’s answering queries, handling verification processes, or even sending out basic reminders to merchants or customers. This means that human agents who typically handle these calls have to work through an enormous amount of repetitive tasks on a daily basis — which could easily lead to mistakes being made or burnout. 

Voice AI can handle large volumes of tasks efficiently and simultaneously, enabling you to scale up capacity as needed.  High-volume but low-value tasks such as making payment reminders or verifying delivery addresses can significantly impact the overall efficiency and productivity of your business operations. Such routine calls lend themselves to automation, which then yields optimisations and benefits that you can pass on to your customers. This frees up human agents to take on more complex and valuable tasks, allowing them to feel more fulfilled as employees. 

2. Optimise customer service support with Voice AI for initial call screenings 

All customers want is to feel heard and understood, especially by the service providers that they interact with. However, it can be extremely challenging and tiring for human agents to provide every customer with a similar standard of service. 

With Voice AI, customer calls can undergo initial screenings before being directed to human agents. This shortens customer wait times and streamlines the call process. For simple customer queries or requests, AI-powered voice assistants can even help the customer directly.  In fact, 67% of businesses using Voice AI report better customer satisfaction and retention, while more than half also report a reduction in process times and operating costs, according to AI Rudder’s research.

When Voice AI is unable to respond or satisfy a customer query, it can route the call to the next available agent based on the intelligence it has gathered. The human agent that takes the call can then address the customer’s questions and provide the necessary assistance more efficiently and effectively. This results in a better customer experience, increasing customer retention and loyalty in the long run.

3. Collect customer data to gain insights

As with any business, customer data is crucial to gain insights into your target audience and future prospects.  But having access to such data is only great if you can use it to gain actionable insights. This used to be challenging with voice calls, but not anymore. Voice AI can analyse calls and extract information on what approaches work best–from language and wording to tone and accents, and even pauses.

Furthermore, Voice AI agents are able to proactively collect and sort caller data in real-time, improving customer data collection and cleaning, resulting in quality audio data for further analysis. By going through the thousands or millions of recorded calls, Voice AI can begin to see (or hear) patterns. In the long run, Voice AI might even be able to sort and assess customers according to their preferences or personality, helping companies streamline and optimise their processes. 
Moving forward, using voice AI won’t just be an option, it’ll be a necessity for FSIs and fintech platforms looking to stay ahead of the game. To learn more about how Voice AI can help your business, contact us at www.airudder.com and schedule a product demo today.