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Benefits of a Customer-Facing Chatbot for a Bank and Its Customers

Capital OneSoftware Engineer · Onsite
MediumSoftware EngineerOnsiteProduct Design & Strategy

Last updated

A case-study opener asking what benefits a customer-facing chatbot would bring to a bank and to its customers. It tests whether you can tie each benefit to a concrete mechanism and metric, and weigh it against risks specific to banking such as wrong answers about money, authentication and privacy.

A bank is considering a chatbot for its customers. In a case-study interview, before any code is shown, the interviewer asks high-level questions: what benefits would this solution bring to the bank, and what benefits would it bring to the bank's customers?

Clarifying Questions

  • What will the chatbot handle: general questions only, or account-specific requests such as balances, payment due dates or locking a card?
  • Which channels will it run in, such as the mobile app, the website or messaging apps?
  • Will it hand conversations off to human agents, and does it replace or supplement existing support channels?
  • Is the main goal to reduce support cost, to improve the customer experience, or both?

Hints

Hint 1

Two sides of the value: Treat the bank and the customer separately, and for each benefit name the mechanism that produces it rather than an adjective such as "convenient" or "efficient".

Hint 2

Benefits come with costs: Think about what a chatbot can get wrong when the subject is someone's money and personal data, and how that eats into the benefits.

Follow-up questions

  • Which metrics would show that the chatbot is worth keeping, and which guardrail metric would make you scale it back?
  • The chatbot tells a customer the wrong payment due date and the customer pays late. Who bears the cost, and how should the design prevent it?
  • Which customer requests should the chatbot never handle on its own?
  • How would the benefits differ for customers who rarely use digital channels?