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Money talks: the emergence of conversational assistants in Financial Services

Capgemini
December 1, 2020

With the advent of consumerism, change is really the only thing we can count on to remain constant. In this world of continuously evolving consumerism and changing customer expectations, your technological capabilities need to keep pace. There’s a paradigm shift in customer expectations that is compelling financial institutions to transform the way they interact with customers. This paradigm shift is being driven by the following key developments:

  • Changing demographics – a growing Millennial customer base
  • Demand for convenience – consumers demand one-touch solutions across their user journeys
  • Hyper personalization – multi-faceted and eclectic customers expect real-time customization
  • Digital alter egos – increasing comfort levels in delegating tasks to an AI-enabled assistant
  • Connected consumers – increased adoption of IoT devices are fuelling a shift towards voice applications.

In expanding on these developments, Capgemini Research Institute findings show that Voice will become the preferred medium as customer tastes continue change significantly in the financial sector.

Give your customers service to talk about

Speech is becoming a major interface that enterprises need to embrace in order to deliver the experience that their customers are now demanding. With COVID completely changing the game, there’s a seamless shift taking place from touch to touchless interfaces. Speech provides one of the best alternatives for customer interactions during these unprecedented times. This is why we believe that having the right technology framework or accelerator, which helps customers to adopt voice-based channels of communication will keep you ahead of the curve.

Introducing CapVoice – a voice assistant framework that helps you develop conversational commerce applications for your customers

CapVoice’s framework is built on Microsoft’s Azure BoT Service and Virtual Assistant framework and helps you deliver voice-based interactions to your customers.

Depending on the business use case, this framework can act as an informative, transactional, or cognitive assistant. These kind of assistants are especially handy in times of crisis where businesses are running reduced staffing levels and striving to not let these circumstances adversely affect customer experience. Voice-enabled assistants can even step in when customer agents are off work. Overall, Capgemini’s CapVoice effectively responds to user inputs across a multitude of channels and devices to offer customers a superior voice experience:

Talk is isn’t cheap

Let’s look at some potential real-life applications where voice assistants like CapVoice can help in Financial Services. For example, a bank could enable its customers to conduct transactions from its mobile banking website or mobile apps – or even personalized devices like Alexa. CapVoice assistant can also be embedded to enable customers to conduct transactions by speech. These could range from simple enquiries to complete fund transfers and operational transactions – with all the necessary multi-factor authentications

Additionally, a wealth management bank can utilize CapVoice to offer basic portfolio enquiry services. In the process of conversation, it can also suggest new types of assets based on a client’s risk appetite assessment.

To learn more about how we can help you implement CapVoice for your organization and your customers, contact me here.

This blog is written by Swaminathan Santhanam. Swami is a technology practice leader who drives new capabilities in Microsoft technology stack that helps financial services clients in driving their digital transformation agenda.