Amazon’s move this week to extend Alexa’s reach into cars and even kitchen appliances is the latest step by the tech giant to insert itself even further into its users’ lives.
But in order for banks to take advantage of the new ground being broken by Alexa, the industry has to better meet customer expectations about how they use voice assistants, according to new studies of the technology.
Alexa’s expansion is part of a larger trend pushing all industries, including banking, into the use of voice assistants. A survey by AppDynamics, a subsidiary of the networking giant Cisco, reported a majority of firms across sectors are either already investing in conversational technology or are planning to do so.
Banks have been among the early adopters of Alexa-driven services and have rolled out their own conversational services. In 2016, Capital One enabled customers to check accounts, pay bills and track spending through Alexa; Bank of America launched its Erica chatbot in May.
However, despite the consensus about the coming dominance of voice assistants — 61% of 1,000 IT professionals expect voice commands to replace typed Internet searches entirely — AppDynamics found in a separate survey of 1,000 millennials that only 24% would use a voice assistant to check their bank account versus manually checking their account.
"While consumers are demanding more functionality and an increased personal experience, accuracy and trust are top of mind," said Matt Chotin, senior director of technical evangelism at AppDynamics. "Checking an account balance is a very simple task, yet it exposes consumers' personal financial information. Consumers will accept voice technology into their everyday routine only if they can trust it."
One drawback, AppDynamics researchers said, is that the rate of errors with voice assistants remains high. Among the companies developing voice assistants, 88% reported speech error rates above 6%, while 35% of firms reported an error rate above 20%.
Chotin said the report shows IT experts think it will take over three years for companies to make strong investments in voice. "In the meantime, banks and financial institutions should focus on gaining consumer confidence by addressing some of the core challenges that come with voice, like accuracy and security, to better align with consumer needs," he said.
The best place for banks to test voice banking is in the mobile app, said Emmett Higdon, director of mobile for Javelin Strategy & Research. Conversation has the potential to help banks simplify mobile banking.
“We’ve added so much functionality to mobile banking, it’s difficult to find stuff,” Higdon said. “Voice will cut through the clutter that has built up over the years.”
Yet banks fail to communicate the benefit of voice banking to customers, Higdon said.
“If you check your balance two to four times a day, there will almost never be an easier way than swiping on a widget,” Higdon said. “You’re never going to use voice for that, and I cringe whenever we use those kinds of examples as something that is quick and easy to use your voice for.”
For customers to adopt the technology over their mobile applications, it needs to be safer and seamless to use than what the customer already has.
“When you ask Erica what can I ask you, she comes back with 92 examples of things you can ask. I’m not going to read that list,” Higdon said. “It’s pretty simple to pay my bills through the app right now.”
Because users still can’t be authenticated by voice alone, many financial transactions are still easier to do over the mobile app. When adding in the fact that many users have multiple bank accounts, things get even more complicated.
“If I say, ‘Hey Alexa, transfer $500 from my BofA checking account to my BB&T savings,’ how does she know which bank is supposed to initiate that transaction?” Higdon said.
Ron Shevlin, director of research at Cornerstone Advisors, said that voice advocates have gone overboard in their lobbying for the technology.
“People say that if you’re not developing voice technology that you’re going to be left behind,” Shevlin said. “But you can’t name a single company that went out of business because it didn’t develop a graphical interface back in the day.”
Customers have several different types of experiences with banks — not all of those experiences are dependent on the user interface that they’re working with.
“Even if the megabanks come out with this stuff — it’s nice, great — but it probably has more of an impact on their internal support cost than it does on the customer relationship,” he said.
Despite the challenges, expanding voice assistants beyond the speaker is the step needed to further their appeal to customers, said Rachel Batish, co-founder and chief revenue officer at Conversation.One, a voice and chatbot provider based in Sunnyvale, Calif.
An ecosystem of connected devices through voice assistants creates “cross-channel interaction where contextual conversation flows from one channel to another,” Batish said.
An example could be “allowing me to pay my bill while I am driving to work — either talking to Alexa on my car ride or calling the call center and asking them to complete the payment — with no extra effort on my side," Batish continued. "And once I get to the office and my Cortana is waiting on my desk, and I can make sure I still have enough money to pay for after-school [activities] for next week.”
The deeper integration into a customer's life gives banks more opportunities to serve them in a very personal way, she added.
“If I know a client is getting married, we can provide support in the form of a loan,” she said. “Being able to create that continuity on one hand and cover all those different use cases is where conversational banking is heading.”
