A report from Allied Market Research suggests that the global chatbot market for the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) industries will be worth $3.39bn by 2027.
That would be a marked increase on a market that generated $494.68mn in 2019, representing a CAGR of 27.3%.
One driver which the report identified was the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has meant customer service centres have been closed due to the lockdown imposed by governments. As a response, many companies have brought in chatbots to deal with increased demand.
That was found to be especially true of the BFSI industry, with pandemic-motivated factors such as requests for mortgage extensions leading to chatbot rollouts. In the insurance industry in particular, a renewed focus on health has led to increased traffic for health insurance – with chatbots again being one of the solutions.
Technology Advances Making Chatbots More Capable
Another factor in the growth of the market is the increased capability of chatbot solutions, building in technologies such as natural language processing, multilingual capabilities and cloud-based deployment. Web-based chatbots are the biggest market segment in both the short and long term. The fastest growing segment, however, is mobile-based, with the development of chatbots with voice and text-to-speech functionality.
The utility of chatbots in the customer experience space is backed up by results, with NICE recently hailing the increased demand for its CXOne cloud customer experience platform, which embeds NICE Enlighten AI. The technology, which the company describes as a “brain”, features specific CX capabilities such as smart routing to connect customer with the most suitable resources.
“By giving our customers the tools they needed to weather storms with agility and built-in adaptability during the pandemic, many discovered CXone provides the foundation to achieve their own improvements in CSAT,” said Paul Jarman, NICE CXone CEO. “By leveraging technological innovations available through CXone like chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI), these customers are becoming more digitally fluent, delivering more engaging customer experiences and winning stronger brand loyalty.”
