Why Bank App Virtual Assistants Still Need Assistance Themselves
By Steve Cocheo, Senior Executive Editor at The Financial Brand
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Many major banks and credit card providers offer virtual assistants to guide customers through their increasingly deep mobile apps. But the technology isn’t delivering all that it could be — or as well as consumers expect.
Reality check: New research by JD Power finds that virtual assistants actually cause significant angst among users, at times leaving them feeling trapped in digital doom loops that they can’t escape.
Further, the firm’s research finds that less than a third of mobile app users — only 28% — are actually using their institutions’ virtual assistants, although this varies among demographic groups.
Key insight: Jon Sundberg, director of digital solutions at JD Power, says the firm evaluates customer satisfaction with virtual assistants on two key criteria: “The virtual assistant should be comprehensive, but also usable. Many chatbots and virtual assistants fall short on both counts. They are not viewed as comprehensive yet, and they are also viewed as difficult to use.”
Virtual assistants have been evolving alongside bank apps for some time, including the likes of Bank of America’s Erica, Chase’s Digital Assistant, Wells Fargo’s Fargo, U.S. Bank’s Smart Assistant, Capital One’s Eno and Truist Assist. In fact, in its U.S. Mobile Banking Emerging Features Benchmark Report for 2025, Emarketer stressed that having a virtual assistant is approaching must-have status.
“Having a virtual assistant in a mobile app isn’t special anymore,” Emarketer observed.
But according to JD Power’s research, rough spots and gaps continue to be a challenge.
Need to Know:
- Customers told JD Power that while virtual assistants can readily handle simple, transactional tasks like balance queries, they lag when it comes to requests to handle more complicated situations.
- Only 38% of active users feel their bank’s virtual assistant is comprehensive and able to handle more than routine queries.
- In spite of frustrations with virtual assistants, when a provider makes one available and customers use it, it can raise customer satisfaction slightly.
- Among users, broad satisfaction with bank and card apps was 18 points higher than nonusers, on a scale of 1,000. However, inability to handle specific queries pulls down satisfaction ratings.
- Usage of virtual assistants tends to be higher among tech-oriented and younger app users, the firm found.
- Affluent customers tend not to use virtual assistants, leaning towards human service.
What’s Troubling Virtual Assistant Users
Some verbatim comments about banks’ virtual assistants from consumer study respondents:
• “It was not able to help me replace my card.”
• “It could not answer a question about fraud.”
• “When I would say ‘Agent assistance,’ it kept resetting.”
• “I asked the assistant to dispute an unauthorized transaction, and it had difficulty doing so.”
• “All I wanted was a toll-free number to get in touch with customer service. It didn’t really do the job.”
Users complained about being forced to start with their institution’s virtual assistant when they knew right away that they needed to deal with a person. Sundberg calls this “digital entrapment,” when the user feels like a prisoner of the virtual assistant — much like loops in old interactive voice response systems.
Contrarian insight: On the other hand, some users prefer to deal with the virtual assistant, and object when they are too quickly routed to a person.
A worrisome tendency: Some respondents complained about repeatedly receiving incorrect answers from their institution’s virtual assistant.
Read more: How Many of These Mobile App Best Practices Is Your Bank Following?
Consumers Don’t Yet See Virtual Assistants as Digital Concierges
“Many virtual assistants do very well with basic, structured, repeatable tasks, but they struggle when it comes to conversational support and handling more ambiguous questions,” says Sundberg. “Assistants are still struggling to comprehend human questions, and to be able to hand off to humans. We’re still seeing a big gap there.”
The more complex the request that a user makes, the more likely that satisfaction with the virtual assistant will drop, according to Sundberg. Often the drops are large — 60 to 70 points out of 1,000, he says.
Sundberg notes that not all virtual assistants are easily discoverable within banking and credit card apps. He thinks that more usage could result if app designers made it easier for users to access the virtual assistant inside the app.
He also points out that consumers tell the firm that the transition from the virtual assistant to live human help can be forced, slow and frustrating.
Sundberg notes that other types of companies, such as mass retailers like Amazon, also offer virtual assistants and that consumers, especially tech-inclined younger generations, are comparing those experiences to what the banks provide.
Read more: More Banking Apps Offer Predictive Insights, But Many Alerts Arrive Too Late
How to Improve the Virtual Assistant Experience
Sundberg suggests several ways that customer experience with virtual assistants can be improved:
1. Provide better connectivity to live agents. “If someone wants to talk to a representative, there has to be a more seamless way to connect to that representative,” says Sundberg.
2. Press for faster, more complete expansions of what virtual assistants can do. “Banks have to continue to push the boundaries of what virtual assistants are able to answer and help with,” says Sundberg. “We’re at a point where the technology is close to ready. We’ve just got to keep pushing to get it to that point for banking.”
3. Devise smart prompts for virtual assistant users. Sundberg says seeing that some pre-built actions teed up in advance will help foster adoption. Think about the most common activities customers are using and set up the virtual assistant to make sure flows are quick and easy, says Sundberg.
Sundberg thinks such “guided workflows” prove more helpful to customers than the virtual assistant equivalent of a static FAQ sheet providing only generic help.
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