Originally published on Retail Brief Africa on 26 August 2022
By Ryan Falkenberg, Co-CEO of CLEVVA Pty. Ltd.
In many ways, technology has made banking a much easier and less frustrating experience. Think about the last time you had to visit a bank branch to get something done. If you’re above a certain level of income and technological proficiency, chances are it’s been years rather than weeks or months. But for all those advancements, there are still glaring weaknesses in the system.
The digital assistants used by most banks are a good example of just how much room for growth there still is. While those digital assistants can be helpful, they frequently don’t offer what customers need. What banks really need are digital advisors.
The problem with digital assistants
It’s easy to understand why banks opted for the digital assistant model. In theory, a digital assistant is the closest thing to a like-for-like replacement for the in-person tellers that customers were used to at bank branches. For the most part, these tellers just had to deal with straightforward transactions such as deposits, withdrawals, and transfers. So when it came to building online digital assistants, most banks probably felt they didn’t have to go much further than that.
The trouble is, unlike digital assistants, those tellers often had deep institutional knowledge, meaning that they were able to help customers when they didn’t know what they needed. And if they couldn’t help, they could at least direct customers to a financial consultant for the help they need.
By contrast, digital assistants operate on a simple question-and-answer model. That means if you ask the digital assistant the wrong question, you’ll get the wrong answer. And if you, as the customer, don’t understand your own needs, then you’re more likely to ask the wrong question than not.
As a result, you’re likely to get increasingly frustrated and end up having to speak to a human agent, rendering at least one part of the organisation’s digital transformation efforts null and void. Perhaps more importantly, however, your overall experience of the bank is likely to be sullied. And with the customer satisfaction levels between the top five South African banks closing rapidly, that’s not something any bank can afford.
Embracing digital advisors
The solution is for banks to instead embrace the use of digital advisors. These advisors should be capable of helping you understand exactly what it is you need and where to get it from. It’s also a need that separates banking from simple retail digital engagements, such as buying from Amazon.
There, all the retailer needs to do is make it easy for you to buy. Banks can make it as simple as possible for you to perform a transaction, but it doesn’t help if you don’t know what you need. A digital advisor can analyse your needs as a customer, as well as the situation you find yourself in and offer you context-relevant, objective advice and then process the decision once you have made it.
It’s not just banks, and their regulators, that should be embracing digital advisors either. Insurers and utilities are just two examples of organisations that would be better off using digital advisors rather than assistants. The same holds true for any organisation where customer engagement is about more than simple transactions.
In fact, by taking an approach that centres digital advisors over digital assistants, these kinds of organisations put themselves in a much better position to provide the kind of digital experience that their customers want. Critically, they need to do it quickly or their customers will begin to look elsewhere.
View the original article here.