How Financial Institutions Can Leverage AI While Maintaining the Human Touch

Sixty-four percent of business owners said that they anticipate artificial intelligence (AI) will improve customer relationships and boost productivity across their business, according to Forbes. And, this expectation has made AI the perceived answer to nearly any problem facing the financial services industry.

While AI and its impact will be incredible, financial institutions must be aware of how it affects customer relationships. AI has the power to make countless business processes more efficient — but efficiency does not always translate to an improved customer experience. Financial providers should take advantage of the efficiency boost that AI can provide, while still maintaining a high level of human touch for the customers.

Where AI Wins — and Where it Fails

Getting the most out of AI comes down to recognizing where AI wins — and where it fails. One of AI’s greatest strengths is enabling businesses to automate highly repeatable processes. And, in the financial services industry, there are many opportunities for just that. 

Certain customer interactions are filled with repeatable processes where AI can have a direct impact on consumers and how they manage their finances. For instance, AI can deliver proactive reminders about upcoming bills. Transactions can be automatically categorized for better visibility into where money is going. Institutions can generate personalized recommendations based on spending habits to help consumers make better financial decisions.

However, money is personal and one of AI’s biggest shortcomings is its inability to empathize with humans. When AI is the only touchpoint between consumers and their financial provider, customer experiences can lose the human touch that drives higher engagement, loyalty, and customer satisfaction.

Make Human Interactions Accessible

More than half of consumers (51%) say money is their main source of stress, according to MX research. And, they want their financial providers to help them navigate their money anxiety. In this light, financial providers need to assess whether their processes and solutions are alleviating or contributing to consumer stress.

In some ways, AI and machine learning can greatly reduce the burden on customer support teams. Providing checking account balances, learning the due date of an upcoming payment, or confirming transactions, and other informational tasks can all be automated and improved through AI and digital tools.

But sometimes, consumers just want to talk to a real person — and not have to jump through hoops to do so. For instance, too often consumers find themselves on a seemingly never-ending loop of automated voice messages that just add to frustration when a simple conversation with a representative could solve their problem. It is not that AI needs to be removed from customer interactions, but rather it needs to be able to recognize where it can help and where it needs to refer consumers more quickly to a human representative. 

Finding Harmony in the Human and AI Experiences

David Autor, MIT economics professor said, “There are two competing visions of AI. One is [that] machines make us irrelevant. Another is [that] machines make us more useful.” 

In the early days of AI, financial institutions jumped on the possibility of AI making people in customer-facing positions irrelevant. Instead, we should see it as making us more useful. There is an ideal middle ground where AI and machine learning improve the impact and efficiency of human-led customer experiences. Luckily, financial institutions do not have to choose between AI and humans. They are not at odds with each other. The best financial services providers will use both.

AI empowers financial services teams to focus their human efforts on what they do best — providing care and understanding to those that need it. And, by finding a balance between human and machine, financial service providers can accomplish more than they ever could with manual processes.