Content, Convenience, and Cost-Savings: Why Financial Orgs Use Chat

Content has a shorter lifespan than we like to believe. It can take days (or even weeks) to produce a single piece of content, but it's only distributed across channels for a set amount of time. It might perform well — gaining traction from a social media post, or seeing impressions in search — but inevitably, traffic starts to dwindle. Once the promotions and campaigns end, we realize our evergreen content wasn't quite so evergreen after all.

Your marketing teams are spinning their wheels to make content. But that content becomes less impactful as time goes on. And to make matters worse, it's buried under more and more content.

Conversational AI experiences, like chat, can extend the life of your content. With a CMS that can manage these experiences, your marketing team can surface relevant content during moments of high intent.

Here's what conversational AI (and the CMS that powers it) can do for financial services organizations today.

It's common for customers to have questions and need help to manage their money outside standard business hours. Chat provides a way to share information with a customer at a time that works for them — even if that's outside call center operating hours.

Content like blogs, FAQs, help articles, and product and service information can all be fed into your chat experience. Instead of rifling through blogs and landing pages, all that valuable information is consolidated in one chat box — and by extension, it's much easier for customers to find.

With online channels like chat, the customer's needs for information and convenience intersect. There's no waiting in line, and no need to sit for 10 minutes on the phone on hold (which causes CSAT, NPS scores to plummet, poor reviews). Instead, chat is a more convenient channel for customers.

Conversational AI is convenient for financial services, too. It reduces the costs associated with servicing customers. An in-person banking experience can cost the organization between $18 and $26. A call center experience is usually $6 to $12. But an online interaction is only $0.80.

The right CMS won't restrict conversational experiences to just your website, either. Your mobile app, your online banking center, your help center, and even your internal team resources can use chat (and the content that you've already created) to meet your customer's needs.

A great CMS makes conversational AI experiences better. It extends the life of your content by continuously surfacing relevant information. Experiences with your organization improve greatly, because the right content is given to the user at the right moment of intent.

The key is to use a headless content management system (CMS). Look for a headless CMS that imports content from other systems, and exports it to other systems as well. This will give you the ability to consolidate all your content into one platform. This is a key feature to look for in a CMS if you intend to power chat, search, and other experiences (ie. online banking, call centers, online support, mobile applications and other enterprise systems like CRM).

By storing all your content in one headless CMS, you can be sure the chat will surface helpful information whenever a customer has a relevant question. Even when the social media impressions stall and the organic traffic tapers off, your content will still provide value to your customers — just by way of chat, rather than blog or help article.

Now you know that your CMS is the foundation of your chat and search experiences, because it houses all the content you need to power conversational experiences for your customers. But how should you set up your CMS so you can start using a chat solution right away?

• Use a headless delivery system. Because a headless CMS imports content from multiple systems, it's ideal for consolidating all your content into one place. This makes for easier content management, too. Then, the headless CMS can also send that content to different channels. This includes chat, but it also includes your website, help site, mobile apps, customer portals, and even first- and third-party channels.

• Structure your content. First, your CMS needs to support structured content. This means you'll want the information within the CMS to be well-organized so the chat can easily understand what the content is (like the name of a person or a product, a review, or a location, a FAQ). Then, you'll also need to map relevant attributes (like an address and phone number to a location, or the NMLS # for a loan officer). This will help the AI in your chat solution pull the most relevant and most accurate content for its conversation with your customers.

• Optimize for intent and language. Make sure that your chat solutions can understand natural language, or all the ways humans ask questions. The AI model should also be able to understand intent, or what the customer is hoping to do with the information the chat will present. (For example, if a customer types "find a mortgage loan officer in Dallas, TX" then the chat solution should understand what the customer is looking to do. Then, it should be able to surface the right content – like a MLO in one of the Dallas branches.) And if you're a global organization or you serve customers who speak different languages, it's also important that your CMS houses structured content and understands intent in those languages, too.

• Integrate with LLMs trained on industry lingo. Large Language Models, or LLMs, are AI algorithms that power conversational AI experiences. When using your headless CMS to power AI chat solutions, you can verify that the LLM is already trained to understand your industry's vocabulary. Whether a customer types "mortgage loan officer," "MLO," "home lender," or even "help getting a mortgage," the LLM needs to understand the customer's intentions to match the query to the best result. Without this feature, even basic questions in the chat can return inaccurate results and frustrate customers.

• Leverage insights and self-learning features. If you're looking for a new CMS, look for built-in features like clustering and suggestions to identify gaps in your content. Then, use AI generation to fill those gaps with new content, leveraging information in your older content. The system should also learn from past experiences and customer interactions to guide marketing teams on the optimizations needed. If you're using your existing CMS, you can find plug-ins and point solutions to fill the gaps in your current solution's capabilities. Or, you can layer a headless CMS on top of your existing solution and benefit from its features without replacing your system.

Chat can extend the life of your content and improve your customers' experiences at the same time. But in addition to the right conversational AI solution, you need the right CMS as well.

With so much time and resources spent creating content, it only makes sense that financial services organizations want to get as much as possible out of each asset. With conversational AI experiences by way of chat, you can maximize the use of your evergreen content. And if that's not enough, you benefit from cost-savings while giving customers faster and more convenient ways to interact with your organization.

At the end of the day, all your content, solutions, and experiences aim to improve your customer's experiences. With chat, your existing content can rise to the occasion — and meet your customers where they are during moments of high intent.