In our earlier blog, “Crucial Role of Localization in Financial Inclusion“, we spoke about how banking platforms should be localized in order to help millions of Indians move towards greater financial security by making the transition from unbanked to banked. We spoke about how localizing content and content systems was the first step towards financial inclusion.
The second step, to close the loop, involves providing localized user engagement. This step involves actively engaging users with communication and interactive tools that prompt users for needs, requirements, questions, and direct them to what they are looking for.
Enabling user engagement in Indian languages involves a variety of tools. Let’s look at the various steps in more detail.
Cross Communication Localization
Of course, engaging with users goes beyond just on platform interaction. Especially with banking, where account notifications, OTPs, PSA messages, and more need to be constantly shared with customers. All these communications are sent across various channels – SMS, email, push notifications, and more.
In addition, all these communications need to be localized in order to truly reach Indian banking customers. Apart from the break in user experience, leaving these communications in English could potentially pose security risks. For example, it could pave the way for OTP fraud, as discussed here.
Localizing communication is an essential step that ensures customers are not left out of the loop once they leave a platform. It can be done with the help of pre localized templates, where more information can be filled in later.
Indic Chatbots
Indic chatbots can help customers by prompting them in their own language about their requirements. While traditionally, reaching the relevant page would involve a potentially complex user flow, Indic chatbots can make the process simpler by helping users arrive at a final action that serves their initial requirement through a conversation.
At every step, a customer can verbally convey their need to the platform, while confirming them with a visual interface. This verbal back and forth continues till the customer is able to confirm and complete their intended action.
This tool takes a process that involves multiple menus and pages and simplifies it to something akin to holding a conversation and selecting the options that apply to customer’s requirements.
Indic IVR Helplines
With banking, customers often have queries, queries that can often be resolved without human intervention. IVR, or interactive voice response, can help banking platforms automated such engagement. Of course, these IVR systems would need to be in Indian languages.
A customer can call a service helpline, which then prompts them for what they are looking for. The customer can reply verbally with their desired action, bringing them straight to the next question needed to further the process, without having to select from a large list of options each and every step, something that can take a significant amount of time.
Personalized Interaction
Not only the localization of communication but also adding personalized messages that will include the name of the customer can really make a huge difference in the user experience. Maintaining a base of loyal customers is easier when the customers are addressed personally. Personalized interactions, especially in the online financial sectors play a crucial role in building the trust of the customers and takes the user engagement entirely to the next level.
Banking Kiosks & Language Support
Banks are now extending their digital solutions to the physical space too, with banking kiosks that users can interact with. Since these are digital solutions, they are available only in English by default. Indic language support must be added to these kiosks so that customers using Indian languages can access the same services their English speaking counterparts do.
Conclusion
For a customer not used to new-age UI/UX, many of these tools can remove the element of uncertainty involved, making the process of securing various banking services painless.
