Digital humans: The next wave of digital banking innovation

50% of banking interactions today are digital, with an uptick of over 18% in the last year alone. However, that still leaves behind half of the banked population, who either never use their bank’s digital services or do so infrequently.

What can banks do to migrate these customers to digital platforms? How can banks engage and personalize digital interactions for superlative CX?

This is where a digital human comes in.

What are digital humans?

Digital humans are AI-powered, multilingual, and contextually-responsive CX ambassadors that help make humanized digital interactions a reality. They are much more than just animated avatars. Backed by a digital brain and NLP engine, digital humans can converse and intelligently guide users towards goal completion. Additionally, with automated agent handoff, they can optimize customer interactions and provide a true human + AI experience as and when the need arises.

As a great blend of both artificial intelligence and the human touch, Digital humans have the potential to be a scalable supplement to human interaction. They can be domain experts, financial advisors, and support staff, all rolled into one and available round the clock, with the ability to serve with multiple customers at once.

“According to a recent report by BCG, the total number of calls to contact centers from banking customers have increased by 14%.”

How can banks use digital humans to boost the adoption of digital channels among customers who require guidance, without losing out on the benefits of personalized human interaction?

Digital humans are the future of the banking customer experience. They can help accelerate digital adoption with a multi-sensory approach, much like a one-to-one interaction with a human agent. By leveraging audiovisual elements while guiding customers towards goal completion, digital humans take out the need for excessive text and complicated instructions which pull customers away from self-service channels.

Along with guiding users through their customer journeys and answering queries in real-time, digital humans have the ability to hyper-personalize customer interactions, helping banks deepen customer relations. Backed with AI, they can quickly analyze huge amounts of unstructured data and process complex user information to identify and predict customer behavior to deliver dynamic persona-based recommendations.

What are the components needed to make a digital human work effectively?

While the concept of a digital human is both fascinating and filled with immense possibilities, there are several components that go into making it a success.

The most efficient solution should be a comprehensive and seamless blend of:

  • Interactive human avatar with multilingual domain-specific NLP
  • Multi-platform scalability
  • AI-powered digital brain for persona-based customer engagement
  • End to end customer journeys with ecosystem integration

Humanized front end with NLP

Interactive digital avatars that can bring a human face to life digitally with seamless lip-sync, and lifelike expressions including nods, eye movements, and smiles. Furthermore, the inbuilt domain-specific NLP module enables the digital human to understand multiple languages and variations of speech, grasp conversation context, and respond in a human-like manner without breaking the customer journey. By interacting with customers in natural language, they guide users through various customer journeys like a human agent, creating unparalleled customer experiences.

Watch the video above to see how BankBuddy’s digital human seamlessly guides a customer through the onboarding process, collects all the necessary information, and completes eKYC without a long, drawn-out application filing process.

Embedded across platforms

Deliver consistent banking CX across all channels– both digital and physical, with a digital human that can easily be embedded on multiple platforms. Offer digitized human assistance to customers on a familiar interface which could be the website, a mobile app, mobile browser, kiosk, and holograms (coming soon).

AI-powered Digital brain

Backed with AI and machine learning, a digital human learns continuously. The digital brain has the unique ability to create a customer’s dynamic persona, conduct peer persona mapping, and link it to the current context for hyper-personalized customer engagement.

It creates a higher understanding of the customer needs, identifies user behavior patterns, and personalizes individual experiences. Based on dynamic customer persona the digital human can thus enhance CX with proactive service and provide personalized recommendations to boost upsell cross-sell revenues.

End to end banking customer journeys with ecosystem integration

With a digital human banks can deliver end-to-end customer journeys across all digital channels and without limiting the digital banking services to just automated customer service or FAQs. Seamlessly integrate with the existing ecosystem, including backend systems, core banking software, contact centers, and partner networks to provide access to complete transactions including money transfer, bill payments, account services, and more.

Human + AI interface

The digital human can help optimize customer interactions with automated agent handoff. It is capable of identifying the need for human intervention during an interaction and automatically routes the customer to an available agent. This includes priority-based routing, language or skill-based routing, fallback request, or depending on the customer sentiments.

The future is ‘humanized’ digital

With the conversational AI market expected to hit the $17 billion mark by 2025, AI-powered digital humans have reached the beginning of an exponential growth curve. The banking and financial sector is predicted to be one of the first to embrace digital humans as a part of their digital transformation strategy.

With the ability to deliver a humanized end-to-end banking experience- from transactions & payments, to customer onboarding, real-time customer support and personalized recommendations, a digital human can guide your customers throughout their financial journeys without completely missing out on the emotional human connection.

Enhance your customer’s digital banking experience with an AI powered digital human.

Read more about how Bankbuddy enables AI powered secure Voice Banking https://www.bankbuddy.ai//AI-based-voice-banking-for-customer-engagement