Banking is changing. The way people interact with their banks have fundamentally changed over the last couple of years, and especially since the effects of social distancing have accelerated digital transformation in all organisations. Chat based self service integrations are here, even for secure applications such as banking. Increasingly, banks now allow one to interact with a chat bot to manage accounts, pay beneficiaries/utilities or transfer funds to and from accounts or persons. While all of this is great while it works, how can banks and financial service providers be assured that the service is performing well, and delivering a positive digital experience for their customers? Is the customer experience being monitored? How does one monitor “chat banking” from a customer’s perspective, and what constitutes a positive customer experience?

Breakpoint’s Apogee is relied on by many mobile network operators and financial service providers to monitor the customer experience for financial services, over any network and over any popular access channel. This includes mobile apps, web apps as well as text based, menu driven interfaces such as USSD. Breakpoint identified the trend towards self service integrations, and we are now pleased to offer our customers the ability to monitor the digital experience over WhatsApp, using the same end-to-end and carrier agnostic synthetic transaction tests that Apogee has been providing since 2015.

Using this latest technology, Apogee is now able to send and receive messages from WhatsApp, in exactly the same way a customer does with their mobile device. At regular, configurable intervals (as frequently as twice per minute), Apogee performs a full end-to-end transaction against the back end system via the WhatsApp contact, and tracks the response times and output received from the session. Even complex transactions that span over additional channels such as SMS can be configured and tested. Apogee will alert on performance degradation and also on invalid/unexpected chat responses received. This provides unprecedented, proactive real time status dashboards of the current, real world experience that customers are experiencing over WhatsApp, further augmenting the insights that Apogee provides for digital services.