Provide Account Status Using Chatbot

Nowadays, customers want to get important information instantly and conveniently. Days of dialing customer service phone numbers are slowly but surely coming to an end. That’s why banks and financial institutions these days try to improve customer experience by automating part of the communication.

Main goals of banking chatbots are to facilitate two-way communication with customers and to remove the burden from the bank's customer support. The basic tasks such as account status, bank account details, questions about loans, etc. are something that a chatbot can handle efficiently on its own, thus allowing the customer service agents to devote their time to complex issues. According to a report by Juniper Research for every query that a chatbot handles, banks save 4 minutes of an agent’s time.

Continue reading to find out how to build and deploy a banking chatbot.

This use case will demonstrate how to define, design, build, and deploy a chatbot which can engage your customers and provide them with relevant information about their account status.

Pre-requisites:

1. Before designing your chatbot, to talk with your customer service/support team. Ask them for the most common customers inquiries to identify highest-volume, least-complex customer intents, such as FAQs and basic queries.

2. Find out the touchpoints in which clients can get information about their account status.

3. Based on the input from the customer support team, group the most common inquiries and design the dialogs for the chatbot.

4. Create intent training files for each dialog, based on the most common questions you identified previously.

IMPLEMENTATION STEPS

Steps over Web Interface

 

1. Log in to the web interface, navigate to the Answers module, and click NEW CHATBOT.

2. To create the chatbot, Bot Name and Channel are mandatory fields. As your channel, select WhatsApp. Before you activate the chatbot, make sure you also configure the rest of settings, such as the Sender number, Language, Escape phrases, and Session Timeout.

3. If you have the intent training file prepared, import it. Otherwise, go to Intent tab and manually create necessary intents required for the dialogs.

4. Based on the bank's input and conversation design, create all required attributes. Attributes can help you with saving relevant information, e.g. user information, json files, locations, or similar.

5. If the conversation design requires keywords, create keywords.

6. Once most of the intents, attributes, and keywords exist in the Answers platform, design your dialog. Based on the conversation schema, use the necessary elements to build the dialogs. Start with assigning the intent.

7. To create dialogs, use elements like Send text, Attribute, and Call API. Include authorization steps needed to confirm your client’s identity).

8. To check the account status, you have to do a few things:retrieve the account information from the end user and then forward it to the bank. To securely encrypt the information, use the Coding element. The bank will authenticate the user and return account balance information.

9. AOnce you encrypt the information, you send it over to the bank using the Call API element. This is how you request the information about the end user’s account balance.

10. When you have the account balance, you send it over to the end user using the Send text element. Use the balance attribute.

11. You can finish this dialog wby asking whether the end user needs any more information and then branching the dialog according to the services you offer.

12. After you’ve finished designing dialogs, use the Conversation Simulator and check how your dialog performs as a live conversation.

 

13. Once you make sure the conversations run as planned, check that all the settings are configured and activate the chatbot.