Oplo has been named as finalist in the Innovation category at the 2021 CSA Awards. The 2021 UK Credit & Collections Conference marked the launch of the new CSA Awards to celebrate the outstanding work and commitment of staff and teams within its membership organisations.
Our entry celebrated the work of our collections team in helping our customers who were concerned about their ability to meet their monthly repayments, and wished to request payment holidays. During this time our call volumes and waiting times increased so we needed a solution to ensure we could communicate with our customers efficiently.
Adaptability
As well as mobilising our people to work from home quickly, we transferred lending staff into our customer service team as we knew we would need additional resource to support customers.
We gave all our agents additional specialist training to bring them up to speed quickly with the new regulatory requirements, ensuring that our call and chatbot scripts aligned with the new measures.
A channel agnostic approach
Oplo implemented the payment holiday scheme ahead of the regulation, thanks to our existing partnership with Webio who provided a conversational messaging channel to complement email, calls and SMS.
We created an automated chatbot to ascertain the degree to which customers were impacted during the Covid 19 crisis. By automating conversations, customers had the ability to agree a payment holiday or revise repayment amounts with ease. Where an agent was needed, the customer was seamlessly transferred to a live agent.
We ensured customers who wished to contact us had multiple options available to them by creating digital forms which were hosted on our website and emailed out to customers to speed up the process of collecting information about the customer’s situation.
A crucial part of this strategy was the ability to prioritise customers who were most likely to need our help. By utilising Credit Reference Agency Income Shock data on our entire database, we identified the customers who were most impacted financially by the pandemic. This led to us identifying priority cases quicker and gave us the ability to give those customers a more enhanced journey.
Keeping in touch
Maintaining positive relationships, reassuring customers, and showing them that we really care during this difficult period was important.
‘Keep in Touch’ bots reached out to customers to check how they were doing, get an update on any change in circumstances and made changes to payments where necessary. We made over 7,000 calls to customers, to reassure them that we were here to help and the explain the options available should the need arise.
Positive outcomes
We were able to reduce our call waiting times at the height of the pandemic by 85% and the payment holiday process that took upwards of 20 minutes over the phone reduced to ~2 minutes via the automated chatbot service.
This enabled our customers to get the help they needed in a timeframe which is best-in-class. It has led to a continued engagement strategy with our customers which is now seeing a response rate 3 times greater than any other channel.
We had ~20% of our loan book in a payment holiday and over 90% of those customers have successfully resumed their normal monthly payments.
