A leader in high-volume, letter-driven debt recovery and high court enforcement, a key part of their operations involves sending over 800,000 parking letters for Private Car Park Operators, which leads to a surge in customer calls for queries and payments. This influx caused a significant challenge with high call volumes, long wait times, and a call abandonment rate of 60%-75%—an issue the service-focused company had long been striving to solve.
TRADITIONAL CHANNELS AND DIGITAL CHANNELS WORKING SIDE-BY-SIDE
Letters are central to many collection's campaigns, since other contact details aren’t always supplied by clients. With creative thinking we’ve brought two channels, that couldn’t be more different and made them work with newer digital channels that improve CX and operational performance.
INTRODUCING CONVERSATIONAL SMS AUTO-AGENT DRIVEN COMMUNICATIONS
Crucial to managing high customer call volumes and abandonment rates was the ability to proactively reengage with customers. Conversational SMS messaging chatbots were designed to deploy within minutes of the customer leaving the call. This proactive channel-shift resulted in:- secured a 76% increase in customer wins/payments resulting in February and March being the best ever collections on record! #
- gave reassurance to customers that resolving their query is a priority
- opened an immediate line of communication with agents
- allowed agents to handle 15+ conversations simultaneously due to the asynchronous nature of SMS
- delivered a 45% response rate
Next was to tackle rising inbound calls, call-waiting times and reduce the rate of abandoned calls. Building upon the automation, chatbot and channel foundation, we launched our WhatsApp initiative.
Given the limited digital data available on our debtors (no phone numbers), letters are the first outreach step. Five trial letter types now include a QR code that customers can scan to kick-start a live agent conversation over WhatsApp. Totally eradicating the need for an inbound phone call. And again, agents have the ability to manage multiple conversations at the same time thus ensuring a resolution that takes place at the customer’s pace.
They have seen a decrease of 26% of calls per month now, as so many WhatsApp conversations are replacing them. These would have called into our call centre before. We are looking forward to rolling this out to our full letter suite.
EXTENDING SELF-SERVICE CAPABILITIES WITH IN-MESSAGE PAYMENTS
We are now working on payments functionality using WebioPay that enables us to send payment links via Webio Chatbots or Agents during a live customer conversation, when customers are more likely to take action. And not only improve payment rates but also give a better customer experience.
