While many Canadians are generally satisfied with the service provided by banking and credit card apps, there is a limit.

As a recent JD Power survey found, consumers are using AI virtual assistants to get easy answers from the apps but when more complex, detailed service is requested, that’s where they generally fall short.

“What’s interesting here is that with virtual assistants as a channel of interaction for the consumer, is that the promise is quite real but the execution ends up being somewhat uneven,” Jennifer White, managing director of financial services intelligence at JD Power told TechNX in an interview.

“Consumers will reward virtual assistants when they’re useful and comprehensive, but many are just not hitting the mark. The apps are not quite yet delivering ease of use and breadth of capability”

Overall satisfaction remains high

Consumer insight and data analysis company JD Power gleaned the insights after hearing responses from 10,167 retail bank and credit card customers from January through March.

The firm originally provided intelligence on automotive issues, beginning in 1968, when JD “Dave” Power founded J.D. Power & Associates, according to the company. In the 1990s, it expanded into covering other industries.

The survey found overall satisfaction and usability of banking and credit card apps was 678 out of a possible 1,000 points. However, once the virtual assistants were asked for more complicated answers to questions, that approval dropped, according to the survey.

“Satisfaction starts falling when the customer is trying to use them for more complex or maybe even emotionally-loaded needs: things like resolving a specific problem, disputing a charge or dealing with fraud. Those more complex issues are typically not being handled well within the virtual-assistant channel, and so it’s having an impact,” White said.

When asked for such simple things as providing a bank balance or help in unlocking a card or even providing simple financial advice, there was a “dramatic impact on satisfaction,” she said.

“We get a lift again on telling me my credit score, help me understand my credit card benefits; where it’s a very specific ask that can return a structured answer. How do I pay my bills? It’ll help me pay my bills. Tell me my account balance. All those examples that I just gave you the virtual assistant has an opportunity to provide a quick answer; complete a simple task, and in those cases, they tend to be most successful.”

Satisfaction rose 160 points higher than the industry average when the virtual assistants were perceived by customers as being competent and able, according to the survey.

Improvement required when consumers are stuck

What’s needed by the financial companies, according to White, is a better way to handoff the customer to a live employee when the virtual assistants cannot adequately answer a question. In many cases, this produces great frustration on the part of consumers.

“I think the challenge becomes very often once you ask the question, customers can get stuck in this endless loop of trying to get out of the virtual assistant and into another channel,” White said.

But what seems to be the area that needs the most improvement from banking and credit card apps, security issues tend to be the “weakest,” according to the survey, she said.

“If you need some form of judgment from the bank, some assistance with escalating the level of support, or you need more personalized help, the problem . . . is that the users start to describe slow escalation processes, looping through the self-services options.”

“In that instance, the assistant becomes a barrier instead of the bridge that it was built to be,” White said.

How to serve banking customers better

The message to developers of these apps is that financial institutions need to refine the user experience before adding new features onto a flawed product.

“It’s a reminder that design and development — whether that is AI or not — has to be useful before it is impressive. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be impressive, but useful is important first.”

But by making a better product, there is an upside, the survey found.

“All institutions should be encouraged to invest and act on improving that whole suite of services for the consumer because there’s real upside in engagement and loyalty and trust when the tools are done well.”

The institutions also need to be aware of the limitations of these virtual assistants.

“The risk is not that you shouldn’t have a virtual assistant, it’s just overestimating what it can do,” White said.

“The strongest performers in digital satisfaction are not necessarily winning because they’ve built the most features, they’re winning because they execute those fundamentals really well.”