“Oh my god, it moves!” A qualitative analysis of how millennials experience conversational agents of financial institutions.

In the recent years, conversatinal agents have increasingly been gaining fame for providing assistance in multiple domains, one of which is customer support. With each passing day, more and more industries are implementing this technology to help with menial tasks, and save resources such as money and time. By the same token, financial institutions too have been quick to adopt this technology. While ample attention has been paid to the adoption of conversational agents, not much light has been thrown on its adaptation in these realms based on the needs of the consumer. By using the elements of social psychology and breaking online consumer experience into four elements of namely infromativeness, entertainment, sensory appeal, and social presece, this study applies the same to the perception of chatbots and answers the following question: how do millenials experience banking chatbots? To do so, ten in-depth interviews of millenials who had previously interacted with a banking chatbot were carried out and thematically analysed. The results of the study show that how informative and socially present a banking chatbot is, matters most to the consumers, while the entertaining and sensorially appealing elements do not take much pecedence in their experience of a bank’s chatbot. Just like their bank manager, as long as the chatbot helps with their issues, smiles at them, and keep their money safe, the millenials seem to be satisfied with the experience.