Non-banking financial Companies (NBFCs) face significant challenges, including high support costs and customer dissatisfaction. Increasing query volumes, long wait times, and overworked agents indicate a need for change.
AngelOne, an Indian stock and brokerage house, significantly reduced customer support costs. Thanks to GenAI, AngelOne’s ticket volume was reduced by 20% in less than two months. The best part? 65% of the existing users of AngelOne were able to resolve their queries within 1 minute, a jump right from 30 minutes!
Wondering how? We’ll get to that part.
Before that, let’s discuss the current loopholes in NBFC businesses' customer support initiatives and how AI can address these limitations.
What’s the customer support scenario in NBFC? Is it like in the absence of GenAI?
NBFCs face critical challenges in their customer support operations. These include:
- Overworked and burned-out support agents
- High query volume
- Long and never-ending customer waiting times lead to lower customer satisfaction rate
- Rising costs of operating support centers
There have been all kinds of complaints against NBFCs (and financial institutions in general) regarding customer support. A frustrated customer writes on Reddit about how support agents raised and auto-resolved their support ticket during the call, even though it wasn’t addressed. In the same thread, another user writes how they were asked to visit the branch to change their old home address.
These complaints prove that customers are deeply unsatisfied with the service they receive from NBFCs. But on the contrary, the support staff are not living their best lives. They are handling thousands of support tickets as we speak, and this work pressure is forcing them to make half-hearted attempts at resolving customers’ queries.
All these examples and the current customer support scenario in NBFC scream the need for AI as soon as possible. GenAI-powered self-support tools empower customers and reduce ticket volumes, especially those originating from repetitive queries.
For example, think of the same issue mentioned above. With GenAI, customers can either update their address by themselves or ask the AI chatbots to update it. The whole process doesn’t require manual intervention.
GenAI technology addresses core challenges like long waiting times, overworked employees, and unsatisfied customers. It reduces support ticket volumes by enabling self-served dashboards and acts as an extra hand for support agents, providing them with more context for each customer query.
Result? Significant reduction in support costs.
Why GenAI in the NBFC Sector?
Now, you might wonder why GenAI is suddenly in the NBFC sector. Why not address these challenges by hiring more support agents?
Well, while that can be a solution, it is certainly not a sustainable one. AI is revolutionizing all business sectors. Its capability to handle data while speeding up outputs and making the user experience extremely easy is remarkable.
If we look at the NBFC sector and its current flawed customer support arrangement, it needs to leverage the following capabilities of GenAI:
- Manage tickets on behalf of the support agents
- Providing context and suggestions to the agents to resolve customer queries faster
- 24/7 availability to distance or varied timezones don’t become the barrier
- Data protection and its ability to stay compliant
An Accenture study shows that empowered customers love and prefer all these qualities of GenAI:
It's high time NBFCs note that customers no longer communicate in a structured format. It is no longer just about structured, transactional data. Instead, customers prefer to send voice messages, text messages, screenshots, and other forms of unstructured data to establish their queries. GenAI leverages big data to carefully process these requests and offer customers the level of personalization they deserve.
With the huge competition in the NBFC sector, a scalable technology that reduces cost can easily be your key differentiator.
How can GenAI Slash Customer Support Cost in NBFC? - Best Practices
GenAI holds immense potential in the NBFC industry. It encourages simpler customer journeys for new loans and repayments, automates responding to customer queries, tracks application status, and analyzes documents without involving support agents each time. You can even create personalized financial advisors that recommend custom strategies for a customer’s long-term sustainability and cross-sell other brand offerings.
Let us give you a clear picture of how GenAI can easily slash customer support costs for NBFCs:
Self-served, custom-made financial tools for customers
Self-service tools empower customers to resolve their issues on their own, without contacting agents or visiting the branch every time they need the slightest support. This is a win-win situation for customer support teams and customers. Self-served tools save support agents from overworking and significantly reduce operating costs in the process.
A 2010 study conducted by Forrester clearly stated that 72% of US-based customers prefer using a company’s website to get answers to their questions rather than contacting support. And that was a decade ago, even before the buzz over GenAI tools. Now, imagine what customers today would expect from NBFC websites.
NBFC customers now look for:
- Personalized and localized loan offers
- Custom chatbots that proactively communicate and cross-sell loan offers with customers
- AI assistants that answer all loan and repayment-related queries
- Chatbots that guide users through the application and provide personalized loan offers based on their initial inputs
GenAI reduces support query volume and assists agents in processing queries faster
AI-powered self-service platforms and chatbots can resolve common, repetitive customer queries around the clock. A Gartner report estimates that by 2027, chatbots will become the primary customer support channel for approximately a quarter of organizations.
Chatbots and virtual assistants are equally helpful for support agents. Apart from offering 24/7 support, these AI-powered tools come with pre-programmed knowledge libraries. Support teams can use this library to identify if a similar query was resolved before, how it was treated, and what the next course of action should be.
For example, Alltius’ support agent assist tool helps agents get to know customers by checking your CRM, dive deeper into their issues by summarizing their complaints, and find easy solutions with a quick dose of product knowledge.
According to Salesforce, 64% of customers expect companies to interact with them in real time. No wonder self-served tools like support agent assistance not only reduce contact center costs but also increase customer satisfaction.
AI-powered self-served tools save costs
Going back to the case study we started with, AngelOne, a leading brokerage company, was dealing with a major increase in its support ticket volume. With a team of 1000 support agents, the average waiting time would be as high as 30 minutes. Add to this, there was a disparity in knowledge among the agents, as keeping product documentation up to date was a major challenge.
This was when AngelOne contacted Alltius, an AI assistant for financial institutions. Alltius’ AI assistants went live within three months across the web and mobile app platforms of AngelOne, covering up to 80% of user queries. Alltius’ in-product assistance also filled documentation gaps and product issues.
The result was not only a staggering 65% reduction in self-service ticket deflection but a significant reduction in the operating costs of AngelOne.
Read the full case study here.
What’s Next?
As a next step, NBFCs should examine their customer support operations more closely and identify the gaps causing customer dissatisfaction and cost leakage. The goal should be to empower both support agents and customers while saving their hard-earned money, which is currently being spent hugely on operating costs.
If you are looking to cut customer support costs by 50%, we recommend Alltius.
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