Accelerating Digital Customer Engagement Success with Conversational SMS
Oplo is a UK-based lender that provides personal loans, car finance, and secured lending to customers who may be underserved by mainstream banks. With a strong focus on fair and responsible lending, Oplo is committed to making borrowing more accessible, offering transparent and flexible options to help customers take control of their finances. Now part of Tandem Bank, Oplo continues to support individuals and families across the UK with inclusive and customer-focused financial services.
THE BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Oplo’s customer engagement processes were designed around having to speak to customers, with 95% of all engagement taking place via the phone, which is in direct contrast to how customers wanted to interact.
Keeping the status quo was not an option. The team wanted to seize the opportunities of conversational messaging technology offers to streamline customer communications, drive customer engagement, and increase agent productivity rates.
Also with Covid they needed a communication channel that was swift, concise and had the ability to manage thousands of inbound queries, payment holiday and payment plan rearrangements. And they needed it fast!
HOW ARYZA ENGAGE HELPED
A conversational SMS messaging AI agent strategy was developed to handle the massive spike in inbound customer queries, proactively reach out and guide anxious customers through a simple, efficient and timely engagement process.
Introducing Conversational SMS Driven Communications
With customers concerned about their ability to repay loans and household bills, agents who were working from home were swamped with inbound customer calls. Oplo’s ability to quickly respond to customers over the phone and email to manage the nuances of each customer’s conversation was put under severe pressure. So, the team turned to conversational messaging to reduce pressure from agents and more efficiently engage with customers over messaging channels.
Crucial to managing customer call volumes was the ability to proactively reach out to customers. Conversational SMS messaging AI agents were deployed to ascertain if a customers’ income and ability to pay had been affected by the pandemic.
Messages were crafted using an empathic tone to reassure customers and give them confidence that their circumstances would be handled quickly and positively.
Automating Customer Conversations
By automating conversations, customers had the ability to agree to a payment holiday, re-schedule payments or revise repayment amounts all without the need to talk to an agent. In the cases where an agent was needed, the Webio AI agent seamlessly transferred the conversation to a live agent, who was able to view the live conversation on their screen and let agent “Smart Phrases” assist in responding if needed.
Key to successfully managing high customer conversation volumes is the ability for bots to understand customers responses and guide them on the correct path, which is what natural language understanding Aryza AI Agents are trained to do.
Speed to Value
The deployment was lightning fast. It only took a couple of days and core to campaign success was the ease with which friction-free improvements were made based on customer behaviours during live campaigns.
The Aryza Engage solution is fully configurable allowing non-technical staff to design and build each customer conversation flow to whatever level of complexity needed.
In today’s challenging environment the Webio conversational messaging platform continues allows us to engage with more customers than ever, we are more efficient than we have ever been and can now spend valuable time giving the extra support to those customers who really need it.
Richard Sharp | Managing Director – Consumer Division
