The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau- CFPB has gone on to warn that the financial institutions that deploy chatbots poorly will go on to retard consumer interaction and thereby stand as a barrier when it comes to resolving problems, as per an insight that got published on June 6.
It is well to be noted that the report from CFPB goes on to highlight the challenges customers face when technologies as advanced as AI begin affecting their experience as they turn to financial institutions for assistance pertaining to products and services.
As per the Bureau, it has gone on to receive numerous complaints from customers who have tried to reach out to their respective banks for timely as well as straightforward answers when it comes to their queries and to raise a dispute.
In order to curtail costs, several financial institutions are integrating artificial intelligence tech so as to drive people towards chatbots, remarks Rohit Chopra, who happens to be the director of the CFPB. He adds that a poorly deployed chatbot is bound to cause frustration for customers, lessen trust, and also lead to law violations. As per the bureau, chatbots such as ChatGPT from OpenAI, which was introduced in November last year, can go on to generate erroneous outputs that might as well be undetectable by certain users.
Notably, in April, the CFPB announced an intra-agency initiative to crack down on unchecked AI when it comes to lending, employment, and housing. At that time, Chopra had said that the CFPB was thinking about the future of banking, be it in the metaverse or some kind of AR context. He added that they were indeed doing some right work on how AI might go on to undermine or even create risk in customer care that’s personalised to the level that the biases get introduced within the system, or for that matter, even wrong information.
It is estimated that almost 37% of Americans went on to interact with a chatbot last year so as to pay bills, look for recently done transactions, or even perform some other operations, and as expected, that figure is bound to grow consistently.
While most of the banking sector goes on to use simple rule-based chatbots so as to route customers to FAQs or limited responses, some institutions have gone a step further in developing their own chatbots by way of training algorithms along with chat logs as well as real customer conversations.
The CFPB adds that products as well as services can be extremely complex, which makes it even harder for customers to dig up the information they happen to be looking for through FAQ responses. Financial institutions must avoid using chatbots as part of their primary customer service delivery channel since it is pretty clear that they will not meet the exact needs of the customer.