Role of Chatbot in Customer Service: A Study from the Perspectives of the Banking Industry of Bangladesh

Surajit Sarbabidya and Tama Saha

The use of robots in live chats often known as chatbots is an emerging, smart and readily adoptable technology. It is also now a common customer service strategy as this is very much beneficial in rendering various customer services such as one-to-one conversations, customized offer, responsive customer service through 24/7/365 availability, etc. From this perspective the current study is an attempt to examine the role of chatbot in customer service of the banking industry of Bangladesh. The current study is the embodiment of both primary and secondary data collection and their analyses in which, the secondary data have been collected from the recent research findings and the primary data have been collected during the month of September 1, 2019 to November 30, 2019 from the sample size of 125 respondents including users and employees of digital banking service providers using judgment sampling method through a structured and self-administered questionnaire. The current study found the feasibility of using chatbots because of its varied forms of benefits in rendering customer service which include i) gathering feedback and suggestions from the customers via simple question-answer interaction so that the lead page of the website of the concerned organization can be improved, ii) assisting users in navigation on the site, to limit the amount of clicks and to shorten the time to reach the desired information or product so that social relationships and emotional bond with customers can be built by increasing their confidence in the company, iii) using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to give unique feel in human-like conversations and personalized response to its customers and many more. Thus, chatbots centric services can be considered to enable effective customer service and thus ensure business growth and development of the online banking in Bangladesh.