Episode 002: Conversational Banking: Transforming An Old System

Conversational Messaging Podcast by Gupshup

In today’s episode of the Gupshup Conversational Messaging Podcast, Beerud and Srini talk about how the banking industry keeps up with the digitized world. Together, they discuss the challenge of transforming offline and online banking to “conversational” banking, which makes banking seamless for all generations. They also discuss the three stages of this transformation: the marketing, transactional, and support stage.

Making The Experience Seamless

Banks found ways to reduce consumers’ pain points by launching banking websites and applications. However, consumers still take a lot of time and effort to do simple transactions like payment, balance inquiry, money transfer, and such. Beerud thinks that it’s more convenient if consumers are able to do everything in one go. How? By incorporating these easy transactions in messaging-like platforms

“Search ads, social media ads, or other digital ads are the different entry points, whether it's offline or online advertising. From that, they come into this conversational experience where the users can customize their journey, as they discover and find the right product. That’s the marketing part.” - Beerud Sheth, CEO of Gupshup

Making The Experience Contextual

Simple transactions are a perfect opportunity to upsell or cross-sell to consumers. Its success lies in making sure that the offers and recommendations for the consumers are timely and relevant, making it an added value to their experience. This contextual placement of transactions is a win not only for the consumers but more importantly, for the banks as this prompts more transactions from the consumers.

Making The Experience Satisfactory

Beerud talks about how conversational banking positively affects customer satisfaction as it promotes unlimited availability and accessibility. Instead of making the consumers unhappy because of long hold times on the phone, conversational banking allows them to resolve conflicts at their own time and pace. Most importantly, with continuous development, this kind of banking with the highest regard to data security and user privacy can be the safest and most secure.

“If you spend a lot to provide the right experience, then your margins are lower. On the other hand, if you spend less, then you drive a lot of customer dissatisfaction. Conversation experiences in the customer support area allow you to have 24/7 availability.” - Beerud Sheth, CEO of Gupshup

To know more about Conversational Banking, listen to this episode.

Bio:

Beerud is the co-founder and CEO of Gupshup, the world's leading platform for cloud messaging and conversational experiences. It is used by over 30K+ developers and handles over 4.5 billion messages per month. He previously founded and led Elance (now Upwork, a publicly listed company), the pioneer of online freelancing and the gig economy.

Prior to founding Elance, he worked in the financial services industry – modeling, structuring, and trading fixed income securities and derivatives at Merrill Lynch and Citicorp Securities.

His graduate research, at the MIT Media Lab, involved developing autonomous learning agents for personalized news filtering. Beerud earned an M.S. in Computer Science from MIT & a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, where he was awarded the Institute Silver
Medal.

Srinivas has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing and demand generation.

Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum and Tejas Networks.
Resources:

Gupshup.io