Here some chatbot tools you can find in the market:
- Live Person https://www.liveperson.com
- Live Chat https://www.livechatinc.com
- Amazon Lex https://aws.amazon.com/lex
- ChattyPeople https://www.chattypeople.com
- MEOKAY https://meokay.com
- Botsify https://botsify.com
- Chatfuel https://chatfuel.com
- Facebook Messenger Platform https://developers.facebook.com
- Telegram Bots https://core.telegram.org/bots
- BotKit https://botkit.ai
- FlowXO https://flowxo.com
- ManyChat https://manychat.com
- Botsociety https://botsociety.io (we used this application)
- Motion.ai https://www.motion.ai
- Morph.ai https://morph.ai
From our experiences and research finding in the financial sector. There are some pain points that financial companies and their customers suffer from. Customers suffer from paying banking fees. Entering into the collections process is an unwanted situation for both parties. The lack of direct and instant communication between customers and lending companies for preventing miss repayments is another problem in the financial sector. Also creating a service for helping people who are in financial difficulty.
Lending companies like banks have to collect their unpaid debts from clients. These unpaid debts can be loans, credit cards, unpaid bills, missed mortgage payments. If the customer missed one or two payments, they will enter collections. This is a costly process for a bank by means of effort and time to recover these payments. Also for the customer side, it isn’t good for the customer by means of credit score or having additional costs to them.
There are different approaches and ways for following a creative process. We would like to follow a well-known model defined by the Design Council called Double Diamond. This model includes a discovery phase that gives us a chance to create an insight into the problem, a definition phase that will be a foundation for the further creative process. The third phase is the development phase for creating a prototype. The last phase is the delivery stage for the final version of our product.
We focused on the current collections processes, personas, possible solutions, user scripts and the prototype. We didn’t follow the exact user centre design given time and resources.
Our research was based on creating insight into the collections process that banks and agencies perform. This gave a chance to understand the pain points of lenders.
Basic collections process can be defined as the following:
- The customer misses a payment
- The lender sends warning letters
- The customer is charged a fee
- Lender continues to try to contact the customer with letters and calls.
The object of defining the process was:
- Understanding in which point, the missing payment occurs
- How the system forces the customers for the outstanding payments
- Is this a one-off outstanding payment or a premiss of a bigger financial problem?
- Optimizing the process by preventing the unnecessary creation of outstanding balances for the customers who don’t have any intention to pay
In order to develop an insight about the needs, goals and behaviour patterns of our users, we prepared 3 different user personas which have potentially have struggles for payments.
When we finalised the user personas, we continued with a brainstorming session for creating various solutions which could be an answer to the problems while using a chatbot.
Once we had an idea of the different solutions, we started to map out the user journey and user scripts for our chatbot prototype.
