This post originally appeared on the Finn AI blog, which is now part of Glia.
Digital and Mobile banking are quickly becoming the primary platforms of choice for bank customers and credit union members. This adoption of digital services provides a great opportunity for meeting customer needs, but presents its own handful of engagement challenges as well. This is a dynamic understood well by Q2, a digital platform provider for banks and credit unions, who have a specialized knowledge of the needs of banking end users online.
“Banks and credit unions serve a very large, differentiating end-user base, with a lot of features and a lot of products,” says Greg Varnell, VP of Product & Development for Q2. “One of the trends we’re seeing with the move to digitalization is that bringing all of these features and products together in the digital world can be quite complicated.” Emerging digital customer service tools can provide opportunities unique to the on-screen customer experience, but ensuring all these tools are navigable and intuitive to use can be a struggle. Thankfully, digital platforms and customer experience services are making digital banking easy to use by streamlining multiple digital support tools into one streamlined support channel.
Embracing Fintechs to Meet Customer Needs
An increasing number of younger generations are using third-party fintech apps, such as money transfer, investment management, and money management apps. These apps are stepping in and offering services that banks and credit unions haven’t offered digitally yet, causing people to have multiple unrelated financial apps on their smartphones to manage their money.
Even though respondents to our survey were quite likely to be using services offered by fintechs, however, trust in fintechs remains much lower than in traditional financial institutions. If a financial institution could integrate these fintech features into their own digital banking platforms, it would allow for the trust in traditional banks and credit unions to become paired with the specialized functionality of fintech services. Q2 can allow you to do just that, by partnering with fintechs to allow for seamless, official integration with Q2-based banking platforms.
“At Q2, we have used our technology stack and our caliber SDK to invite the fintechs to come integrate directly into our digital banking platform” says Varnell, “this makes it easier for end-users to identify and locate those [features]… we really have an amazing opportunity to put the exact application an end-user is looking for right in their lap”.
Streamlining Digital Customer Service with Glia on Q2 Using AI-Powered Virtual Assistance
John Fernandez, the SVP of Marketing at Glia, has an important observation for banks and credit unions to keep in mind: “When over 80% of phone-callers are either on a screen or near a screen, it doesn’t make sense that so much of customer service is purely phone-only.” Not only are users increasingly less willing to interact with their financial institution over the phone, but migrating away from phone-lines and moving to online service will consolidate the CSE into a single, seamless channel. On-screen, digitally-focused customer service is a convenient way to converge and streamline your contact channels into a singular, focused point of access. Using digital customer service tools like Conversational AI allows for integrating both online self-service and agent-guided assistance into the same messaging channel simultaneously.
“Virtual assistants provide intelligent, guided, 24/7 self-service that allows for both efficiency and improved customer service” says Fernandez. Integrated both into Glia and Q2, [the Glia Virtual Assistants] banking chatbot can both help users self-serve themselves online in an intuitive and easy-to-use way, and guide users to live human agents when they’re needed the most. Rather than tossing customers back and forth between digital self-service and phone calling to speak with live agents, keep all of these interactions contained in the same messaging window with an AI chatbot integrated with Glia’s live agent chat capabilities.
Supporting Users with a Digital-First Mindset
One of the greatest strengths of digital banking is the ability to incorporate a wide variety of customer service tools into the same application. To avoid the ‘information overload’ problem, streamlined customer support and AI-powered conversational banking can help guide users where they want to be without relying on navigating through complex menus or bouncing them between different modes of communication. Centering your customer service efforts digitally will allow for this elevated, self-contained, and complete service experience.
