Personal Touch in Digital Banking: How Live Chat Humanizes the Customer Experience

Digital banking provides a host of benefits for the end user, from convenience and 24/7 availability to lower costs. However, there is one factor that can be lost within digital banking which many customers still long for. Personal, human interactions. 

This is where live chat comes in. Live chat allows banks and other financial institutions to bring the personal touch back into virtual interactions. Let’s find out how live chat helps banks achieve this human, personalized communication, while delivering the convenience of digital banking they now expect. 

Real time communication 

Live chat lets banks communicate with customers in real-time, providing immediate assistance and support. This can help to establish a personal connection between the customer and the bank as the conversation closely mimics a face-face interaction. The agent can also respond quickly and efficiently to the customer’s needs, which can increase their sense of personal connection with the bank. 

Live chat also helps to create a more conversational and informal tone in communication, which can also increase the personal touch. Agents can engage in small talk with the customer and use a friendly and approachable tone, making the customer feel more at ease and comfortable. This can foster a sense of trust and loyalty between the customer and the bank, leading to a more long-lasting relationship. 

“Live chat can be very personal. Often people think you can’t engage the same way you can on the phone, but you can. It’s fun, members like it, and you just have to not be afraid to engage and put a little humor or happiness into someone’s day through the written word.”

– Kelli Davis, Assistant VP of Member Support, Cabrillo Credit Union 

Read the full story: How Cabrillo Credit Union is transforming member engagement with Comm100 Live Chat & AI Chatbot 

Personalized support 

Today’s customers expect their banks to know them well, with 66% of customers saying that they expect companies to understand their unique needs. By leveraging the information that is collected and stored within live chat software, banks can provide more personalized and helpful support – in real-time and through analysis. 

In real-time, a live chat agent can view information about the customer including geography and previous chat history. Better still, by connecting live chat with a customer relationship management (CRM) software, agents can view the customer’s account history. With this information at hand, agents can provide more thoughtful and personalized support, like which advice to provide or services to discuss. 

Besides customer insights delivered in the moment, data collected from live chats can be used to monitor key support metrics such as wait times, chat durations, and customer satisfaction. To drive the acquisition of new customers, banks can even see conversion rates and how customers are influenced by unique offers. 

Multi-language 

Unlike other support channels, live chat gives customers the freedom to reach out using their preferred language with confidence that they’ll be understood. Through auto chat translation, customer chats can be translated automatically for agents, and agent responses can likewise be translated for customers. 

Comm100 Live Chat supports 13 built-in languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Bulgarian, Turkish and Greek. 

By offering live chat with auto chat translation, customers can reach out using the language that they’re most comfortable with. Since agents won’t always be available that can communicate in a customer’s given language, translation tools offer another way that banks can demonstrate personalized service to customers. 

Bringing back face-to-face 

As we’ve seen, digital interactions like live chat can provide a high degree of personalization in customer service. However, nothing beats face-to-face to replace the traditional experience of visiting a bank branch. Live chat software like Comm100 Live Chat offers integrated audio & video chat to provide a viable alternative to in-person interactions. 

With audio & video chat, customers can connect with an agent and see them live as if they were in person. Besides providing added personalization of seeing their agent, video chat offers a useful accessibility option for customers that have difficulty typing. Video opens more possibilities as well such as lip reading and sign language for those who still wish to connect in real-time that may be hard of hearing. 

Wrap up 

The virtual nature of online banking doesn’t mean that it needs to lack personalization. Through the tools available in live chat, financial institutions are connecting with customers in increasingly meaningful ways. Live chat lets banks provide better outcomes to customers, and in return receive better data that can drive growth through improved customer retention and new conversions. 

Learn more about how you can introduce Comm100 Live Chat into your financial organization.