Oplo were proud to be the winners of the Collections Award at this year’s virtual awards ceremony. The award recognises the way we developed a solution to help our customers navigate the financial challenges they faced during the Covid-19 pandemic.
We recognised that the pandemic was a very difficult time for many of our customers and that we needed to react quickly to engage with our customers to find out what support they needed during this time. As customers became concerned about their ability to meet their monthly payments and wished to request payment holidays, our call volumes soared and call waiting times rose. We needed a solution to ensure we could communicate with our customers efficiently.
The solution
Oplo already had already partnered with Webio to provide a conversational messaging channel to complement our other customer channels. This enabled us to swiftly create 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 all without the need to talk to an agent. In the cases where an agent was needed, the customer was seamlessly transferred to a live agent.
A crucial part of this strategy was the ability to prioritise those who were likely to need our help the most by utilising Credit Reference Agency Income Shock batch data on our entire database to understand which of our customers were most impacted financially by the pandemic. This led to us identifying priority cases quicker and gave us the ability to give those customers an even more enhanced journey
Keeping in touch
Maintaining positive relationships, reassuring customers, and showing them that we really care during this difficult period was important. The initial contact with customers was just the start of the process as we understood that customers’ circumstances change and we need to be flexible. ‘Keep in Touch’ bots reached out to customers to check in on how they were doing and to get an update on any changing situations and make changes to payment where necessary.
We also made in excess of 7,000 ‘Keeping In Touch’ calls to customers directly in order to reassure them that we were here to help and the options that were available to them should the need arise.
The results
We were able to reduce our call waiting times at the height of the pandemic from the end of March 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 and has led to a continued engagement strategy with our customers which is now seeing a response rate 3 times greater than any other channel.
