Dock9 says that 69 per cent of financial services businesses are considering installing chatbots as part of their customer services.

The conclusion comes from a poll the fintech company carried out recently.

Dock9 managing director Mark Lusted points to the success touted by Nationwide earlier this month, in which the lender boasted of having serviced over 10,000 Covid-19 related queries through an AI chatbot in just over a month.

Lusted says that this shows, “the value of chatbots to manage unprecedented customer enquiry volumes and allow customer service teams to focus on enquiries and customers that require more handholding or are potentially vulnerable.”

He adds that currently, the main issues for firms not having a chatbot, “are around cost, struggling to make a business case due to other priorities and [being] hamstrung by legacy systems”

He continues: “During our Dock9 Tech Talks podcast, we have discussed chatbots at length with our interviewees and it seemed timely to host a webinar on this topic too to help inform those wishing to know more about this evolving technology.

“None of us has a crystal ball, but our survey shows that using chatbots to build contingency within customer service propositions will be a priority across financial services once we have managed and assessed the immediate and medium term impacts of the pandemic on the industry.”