In 2015, one of the fastest-growing credit card issuers in the U.S. had over five million active accounts. With the launch of a new product in the works, these numbers were set to spike by an additional two million accounts nationwide by the end of 2016. iQor was asked to step in and serve these customers while helping the brand decrease agent attrition, increase First Call Resolution (FCR) scores, and elevate the customer service experience.
The Solution
iQor had been providing first-party retention and recovery services to the brand since 2011. But the company had yet to leverage iQor’s growing base of customer care-focused contact centers. After in-depth planning sessions to understand the brand’s goal and objectives, we found the solution. iQor would leverage its strong customer care talent pipeline, advanced agent support tools, and sophisticated speech analytics software to quickly ramp and provide the brand with a robust customer care program.
The Full Scope
We launched our customer care partnership in 2015 with 14 agents in Clark, Philippines to provide general billing and inquiry (BGI) support. After the Issuer opened their credit lines to consumers looking to rebuild credit and receive cash-back rewards, they grew quickly. So we did too. Within seven months, we expanded our services into activation and application inquiries, escalations, retention, express pay, payments, amortization, web troubleshooting, and tech support. We quickly hired and trained an additional 475 agents divided between our Clark and Dasmariñas centers–all with a 94-96% retention rate.
By the start of 2018, we grew once more, ramping hundreds of new full-time agents while maintaining low attrition rates. We also expanded our tech support services to include screen sharing to increase the rate of first-call resolutions.
Large Financial Institution and Auto Finance Lender
Industry
Financial Services
Services Provided
Welcome Calls
Customer Care
Collections (all stages)
Back Office
Support Credit Report Disputes
The Challenge
The auto finance division of one of the largest financial institutions in the United States discovered that a segment of its customers were consistently delinquent on payments, despite a clear ability to pay. The lender realized that it faced potential fraud issues caused by straw deals, or loans taken out by customers on behalf of someone else.
The Solution
To help address at-risk customers and mitigate the potential of fraud, the lender put a welcome call program in place as a part of their overall customer treatment strategy. We know that successful welcome calls targeted to the right customers serve as a powerful risk indicator that reduces the future likelihood of accounts going to a loss. In addition, welcome calls allow the lender to collect valuable contact information while delivering a positive customer experience that supports their brand image.
iQor’s data analytics team helped the lender develop targeted programs for key customer segments. This included identifying at-risk segments of portfolios based on credit score and other key factors. We then helped design intelligent, on-brand scripting to welcome the new customer into the company. These calls had the following objectives:
Welcome the customer to the company, providing a positive first impression in the client’s brand voice.
Reinforce the first payment date and amount.
Observe early warning signals of potential fraud situations.
Calibrate monthly payment of auto loans to sync with pay date and capture wallet share.
Obtain and verify additional contact information to enhance future contactability.
Provide reporting and analytics to help better understand risk indicators and deploy targeted mitigation strategies.
Support the business with comprehensive reporting to monitor the health of the welcome call program.
The Results
Over four months, the lender saw dramatic key metric improvements due to the welcome program. Key successes included:
Early detection of fraud by capturing critical contact information,
Reduction in casual delinquencies and associated costs by enrolling customers in automatic payment plans,
Improved customer satisfaction
473% increase in capturing critical contact information
32% increase in autopay enrollment
27% increase in CSAT
Capturing Customer Contact Information to Prevent Fraud
iQor’s custom-designed welcome call programs help lenders acquire critical contact information from new customers. In doing so, we not only help expand the ways our clients reach their customers, but also help verify the loan and identify fraud indicators early on.
The use of welcome call programs can dramatically reduce the occurrence and associated costs of casual delinquencies. During a welcome call, agents can carefully calibrate monthly loan payments to coordinate with the customer’s pay date, thus ensuring wallet share when funds are available.
Welcome Calls Improve Customer Satisfaction While Reinforcing Brand Values
Early, proactive welcome calls can build customer loyalty, help clear up billing questions, clarify service offerings, and reinforce your company’s brand values.
Analytics-Driven Retention and Omnichannel CX Solutions
The client’s inbound right party contacts increased by 180%
The Challenge
As the fastest-growing credit card issuer in the U.S., our client faces the delicate challenge of reaching out to thousands of customers a day to recover revenue and retain business. But as more and more U.S. households ditched landline phones, it became challenging for the issuer to contact them at the right time on the right number. This caused the issuer to run into a high number of invalid contacts and increased risk with automated outbound dialing.
The Solution
iQor called in our data analytics team to examine the issuer’s accounts and offset the difficulties of outbound dialing with enhanced compliance and inbound contacts. For example, the issuer was executing a high volume of calls on Tuesdays at 4:00 PM, but this was when its right party contact rate was at its lowest. Not only that, our team discovered that after four outbound attempts, the issuer’s return rate significantly dropped. We also found that agents weren’t leaving voicemail messages so customers had no way of being informed of their account status or how to return the call.
iQor worked with the issuer to adjust the dialing campaign to call at the best performing times, which improved contact rates. We also applied a voicemail message at the end of the fourth outbound attempt, which put a voice to that pesky ringtone and gave customers a chance to prepare for the request. When the customer was ready to talk, we routed them to our higher performing agents to ensure they received the best service possible and the best-fitting option for repayment
Goals Met
Limited outbound attempts to increase compliance
Targeted use of high-performing agents for better customer experience
Increased inbound contacts to recover more revenue
The Results
Our dialer optimization strategy saved the issuer thousands from wasted calls. By changing the number of dials per day and launching the voicemail scripting, the issuer’s inbound RPCs increased by 180%, all while remaining within regulatory compliance. And when we began routing inbound calls to agents with a history of high performance and conversion rates, the issuer’s roll rate improved by 2%, meaning more revenue was collected monthly.
15% reduction in dialer spend
180% increase in inbound right party contacts
2% improved roll rate
More About Our Amazing Data Analysts
Outbound calling without reaching RPCs comes at a high cost and produces a large amount of waste in resources, time, and energy. Our client needed a strategy that could target low-performing segments but didn’t know how to find the root cause.
Our data analysis discovered low-performance attributes by using machine learning to assign dialer groups into three different clusters. This showed how successful or not successful agents were at reaching their segments. We used common customer and account qualities across the program including, Risk Level, Credit Limit, Balance, Payment, Over Credit Limit Amount, Number of Cycles Delinquent, Last Amount Paid, and Collectable Balance. The cluster analysis exposed similar customer behaviors with 99.9% accuracy in which our data analysts studied and used to form the customized dialing solutions.
We applied our new strategy to the accounts that fell within the 60 Days Past Due and Multiple Account Holders segments, which had a 0.6% successful right party contact rate. The dialer treatment improved these low-performing accounts by limiting outbound attempts, driving inbound volume with personalized voicemail messages, and routing calls to high-performing agents.
