Artificial Intelligence in Credit & Collection Solutions

Conversational commerce and interactions have grown significantly over the past 3 years. Consumers now expect to engage at their convenience, using multiple technologies. It is predicted that by 2025, 85% of all customer service interactions will exist without person-to-person involvement. How will this be possible…by utilising Artificial Intelligence (AI).

As businesses increasingly utilise the power of data, analytics, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to perform critical business processes and improve operations, intelligent solutions now seamlessly assist people through these processes and the communication journey. AI technology helps businesses, teams, and customers make wiser choices quicker.

From developing new services to providing exceptional customer service, AI enables digital transformation and business growth at a scale never before seen.

• Artificial intelligence has the potential to significantly improve company results and consumer experiences.
• AI-driven customer communication solutions have become a critical consideration for collection agencies, and technology is improving efficiency across the board.
• Artificial intelligence will streamline and further automate processes, allowing more informed and nuanced decisions to be made.
• AI can predict who is most likely to pay and when, as well as providing automated channels for debtors to make and arrange payments.

Understanding AI: How Can It Help Debt Collections?

Machine learning, the basic mechanism that powers AI systems, is all about pattern detection, analysing data, and forecasting probable outcomes. If this happens, then that should happen. It’s a principle that has been applied to computing for decades. Now utilised in the form of conversational AI, significant gains can be made for the debt collection industry. Because AI can spot default loan trends and refine early response processes, including more detailed and personalised approaches to customers, AI-driven outcomes are proving to be a huge success for the industry.

In addition to this, AI can improve existing practices by analysing data and reporting areas of concern. By studying previously recorded calls and the data points provided, and how problems were overcome, data can be generated to improve best practices for the agency.

Now to the solution..

Saascoms Omnireach is an AI credit solutions conversational agent platform which centralises all forms of chat (webchat, SMS, e-mail, Whatsapp and other social media) onto a single engagement platform.

The customer can communicate via their preferred channel and switch between them during their interaction without needing to re-validate their ID.

At the heart of the solution is a powerful and trainable ‘frontline’ AI chatbot called ‘Saasbot’ that communicates in 92 languages and analyses conversations using sentiment, key phrases, and natural language processing (NLP). Saasbot is contextually aware and, through AI machine learning, becomes progressively smarter.

This ‘virtual assistant’ has a pre-programmed ‘Debt Collection’ knowledge base taken from tens of thousands of interactions in a DCA environment and is used to train machine-learning algorithms that power our AI.

The AI engine has monitored and analysed over 100 million conversations and agent responses within the Collections & Arrears environment over the last four years, ensuring our NLP engine has a 93.7% intent and sentiment match success rate. This makes it possible for the AI to identify up to 77% (up 2% from 2021) of the customer intents at the adoption stage.

By providing ‘frontline’ support to the agent function, conversational AI analyses chat quickly and in real-time to automate conversations, drive efficiency, and respond to customer needs. In the first instance, the AI will identify and verify (ID & V) the client via an API or data feed into the client’s CRM database. Once security has been passed, Saasbot will accurately identify the customer’s intent and respond accordingly.

Saasbot detects nuances in a customer’s questions and responses and gives relevant answers the way a human would. The conversation continues until a question has been answered, their problem has been solved, or until the request is transferred to a live agent.

Many tasks can be dealt with without needing agent engagement, as Saasbot takes the customer through a workflow process.

• AI typically resolved 27% of all interactions with a single response
• The latest statistics from Q1 2022 suggest 72.4% of conversations engaging with the Saascoms

Collection & Arrears Chatbot are resolved on the first contact.
Accurate identification of a customer’s requirements is key to providing a high-quality customer journey, raising engagement, providing better CSAT scores (typical 12% uplift) and improving outcomes. By accurately identifying intent, the AI can route more complex enquiries to the best-equipped agent team to deal with them. Conversation CSATS suggest 89.3% of customers were resolved entirely with the Saascoms AI Chatbot.

Omnireach AI credit solutions conversational technology is utilised by nine collections and arrears organisations in the UK, who, on average, process 2.8 million interactions per month. Sectors include energy, telecoms, vehicle finance, home shopping (catalogues), personal finance/loans, and student loans.