#20 Using Chatbots for Customer Onboarding

Many institutions are usually scared by lots of regulations and compliance, and in most cases, they think it's an impossible dream to improve the actual cumbersome customer onboarding process. If you like to learn more on how to engage customers with personalized interactions with an AI-powered chatbot, join us today. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. With me here today is also Arno. Hello, Arno.

Hey, Sascha.

Great, good to have you here as well. In today's episode, we, we plan to cover how organizations can use chatbots to automate their business processes for customer onboarding.

Yes, that's right. So what we're going to cover today is a couple of steps that you could basically use to frictionlessly onboard, you know, new customers using chatbot technology.

So 5 steps and So I think the first step we can dive in straight away is, I think, switching from paper, really. So I think customer onboarding is usually very paper heavy. I remember that was just signing up for some accounts or so with banks or so. This is customer onboarding as well. It's paper heavy and Yeah, I think now doing the transitions from paper into a digital engagement, I think that, that will be the first step.

There is a couple of steps we want to cover, and what we want to focus on, Sascha, is, is really, like you said, to enable this hassle-free customer onboarding journey. And, you know, the first step is, is really to move beyond the speed-up paper into this world of opportunity using digital and conversational engagement. And of course, by conversational engagement, that's what we mean by deploying chatbots. And, you know, for a very long period of times, companies have struggled to improve their paper-based processes. And of course, we've seen a very big acceleration in digital transformation, you know, once the sort of pandemic started, and it increased the adoption of new technologies like conversational AI, natural language processing, you know, and this enabled us to really change the business landscape and the way we we engage with our customers. And of course, you know, at this present time, you know, we need to have responsive digital journeys with our customers, and that will help us to boost customer engagements regardless of their location, what channel they use, or what channel they might engage with us. And of course, this helps us to generate new revenue streams. And also for a lot of organizations, a part of their customer acquisition strategies, onboarding programs must now, you know, adapt to customers' evolving expectations and also all of their operation realities out there so that we— our first interaction with that potential customer is really good, it's hassle-free, it's to the point. So really our first step here, Sascha, is to move from this sort of speed of paper really into this digital conversational engagement channel.

Yeah, that's very good. So yeah, moving to the next point is more about, okay, this sounds really fantastic, how do we get started? And so the next step will be how we can use a no-code approach for agile development of a chatbot technology. So I think this is very important to get these things out very, very quickly and without too much infrastructure burden. So yeah, customer-led organizations like banks and retail e-commerce, so everyone who's dealing with customers on a daily basis, you gain the most from from this kind of technology by ensuring an exceptional user experience. I think nevertheless, customer expectations are constantly shifting really. And yeah, I think that that must be addressed promptly and that's very important. So without losing sight of budget and all the operational resources. So Yeah, I think for this one we discussed that a couple of times in our podcast. Low-code and no-code technologies are really, really good to make fast changes in your organization and to bring new technologies in very, very easy. So embracing these low-code and no-code technologies and the approach can significantly really improve the deployment times and and really transforms that journey for your customers towards a digital journey. And that really applies to the onboarding process. So business users must be empowered to interact with these technologies without being rocket scientists like proper coders. So without the intervention of IT, IT is completely stretched anyway already. So if we can provide this technology to business users, they can put these conversational flows of these chatbots together with building blocks, pre-prepared templates, very nice user interface, drag-and-drop graphical interfaces, so that they can really take ownership of designing that onboarding process. And that's very important that we can really react very, very quickly to the changing landscape and And yeah, and really amaze our customers. That's, that's really key here.

Yeah, now that, that is true. And I think the sooner you can get to that point of value, the better. And low-code is definitely the vehicle for doing so because like you said, you know, when you put these chatbots together, it is like Lego pieces that you could use to, to design these conversational flows. And specifically for onboarding, updating that onboarding journey so it is as good as it can be. And that kind of brings us to step 3, where we want to elevate the customer experience to excellence very fast, and we want to have that as our number one priority and also as the new normal. You know, there's a lot of these, these new digital banks that are coming into the market, and they're gaining increased traction and also market share. And what they're doing is they are leveraging, you know, these digital, remote, multi-channel, customer-engaging models, and they also continuously improve the onboarding efficiency, you know, to make that journey very fast and to serve their customers better. And to make most of this transformation, banks out there are making significant improvements in how they embrace digital transformation to create these customer-first programs that delivers very, very good digital experiences for their customers so that it's easy to onboard customers. It's very easy for customers to engage them. And that again, like we explained in our previous podcast, that leads to, you know, increased levels of customer satisfaction, good levels of customer retention. And, you know, that brings us into this customer-centric view of the world where, you know, customer excellence in the services you provide is really a number one priority.

Absolutely. And we can see that was, you mentioned fintechs and digital banks. So if you sign up with one of these banks, it's just an app. You're going through a very, very swift process. You're communicating with this chatbot or yeah, and yeah, it just takes a couple of minutes and your account is opened. If I think about sort of the incumbent big, big banks, the retail banks we all know, Yeah, not possible at all. So it takes weeks, especially now with all the COVID Suddenly you couldn't even sign up for an account because it took too long. There were not resources, not enough resources to process that. So it's definitely a game changer having this automation-first kind of thinking, using these technologies like chatbots. Yeah, I think even customer service, it's all done by this app. And yeah, most of the time it is about solving the problem straight away. And this is why definitely the younger generation who are now going into the market of maybe having a bank account and all sorts of trading accounts, that kind of stuff, they're going with the players who get this process right and they're not necessarily looking at the big ones.

Yeah.

So yeah, I think that's, it's very, very important that whatever is done is also very personal. Everyone wants that really personal experience and that brings us to this fourth point, to step 4, to really take all the data you have about a customer, your customer, and take all that data and use that to the fullest really, to bring a very personalized personalized interaction to the customer. So customers don't really care how they actually became an account maybe in the past, but they expect really that personalized interaction through all sorts of channels going forward. So, and they want to use whatever device they, yeah, they're very familiar with all these technologies like MS Teams chats, WhatsApp, Telegram, or whatever these technologies are these days to communicate. Communicate. So they want to use those channels really, and they don't want to use that without the need to be asked irrelevant and repetitive questions. So this is where then the intelligence comes in. The chatbots, when they tap into the backend systems and use all that data which is available, then you can get really into highly specific recommendations. Everything is really applicable to that person. You can use all that stuff as well to upsell, but if it's really spot on and really relevant for that individual, for that customer, even an upsell wouldn't be really seen negative. So yeah, using that bi-directional integration from these chat apps with the core systems, CRM systems, ERP systems, or everything what is there. Yeah, you can really deliver on the promise for this personalized engagement.

Yes, that's right. And also, that brings us to the fifth step in today's episode, and that's really choosing the correct technology provider and the criteria for doing so, because obviously customers expect a great user experience when they start interacting with you as a business. Or they go through your onboarding process to buy your services and your products. And, you know, this first touchpoint, you know, should be a benchmark, you know, for yourself to ensure that, you know, that those journeys that you have with your customers beyond the initial onboarding is really good. And, you know, this should be a factor for you when you choose what type of technology you can invest in, you know, when you choose a conversational AI solution, you know, like, like, like a chatbot solution. And, you know, that, that whole technology decision should be really driven by the fact that, you know, you need something that's easily deployed. For example, a chatbot platform that could be deployed quite quickly. You should be able to to build chatbots very easily. And, you know, it should have a nice open architecture so you could integrate with existing systems and also with other progressive modern technologies like robotic process automation or other AI capabilities. So, you know, so you have to have a very clear roadmap what you want to do with this tech in order to make these journeys very slick and friction-free. I think this kind of customer-led framework where your obsession, or this customer-led approach where your obsession is to make sure that your customers are best served, they go through these these exceptional sort of customer engagement sort of journeys with you. These are all things that you need to consider when you go to market and look for a conversational AI solution.

Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, thank you very much for wrapping it up. I think, yeah, these 5 steps, absolutely key to get this right, but Chatbots technology, AI technology, AI-powered chatbots, I mean, it is just one piece of the big puzzle, the big intelligent automation puzzle. So we discussed this many, many times. So there's workflow and case management, there's normal AI capabilities, there's robotic process automation, there's process mining, intelligent document processing, API capabilities. So So chatbot AI is just one of these disciplines to really, yeah, sort of integrate or automate your processes end-to-end. And yeah, it makes sense to look really at all these pieces when it comes to this end-to-end automation. And hopefully this 5-step approach gave you some, some good points to get started with your own, with your own journey on chatbots for your business. And yeah, so we will come back with probably more episodes on chatbots. And as always, let us know what you think about the episode. Feel free to submit some topic suggestions like many of you have done previously on our website, theautomationguys.net. And And yeah, if you like to get in touch with Arno and myself, then yeah, go as well to the automationguides.net website and send us a message there, or find us on the social media networks. And we're very happy to have a chat with you about these technologies. And yeah, so that will be it for today. Thank you very much for listening, and we're looking forward to welcome— yeah, to seeing you next time. And yeah, until then. Let's automate it. Unfortunately, that's it again with this episode of the Process in Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it.