Virtual Customer Assistants in finance: From state of the art and practices to design guidelines

Virtual Customer Assistants (VCAs) are revolutionizing the way users interact with machines. VCAs allow a far more natural interaction, and are gaining an increasingly large role in customer service. The financial domain is especially susceptible of this change, because customer care is of paramount importance. Furthermore, VCAs have the potential of supporting customers in performing routine operations such as money transfers, or in more complex decision-making operations such as trading stocks, both of which require that VCAs display strong reliability. This survey has a two-fold goal. First, we perform an analysis of the state of the art and practices of VCAs in the financial domain. Second, we provide a sort of toolbox that collects the best practices for designing and developing a VCA in the financial domain, guaranteeing a high-quality user experience.