In Focus Collections


Left-right: Natalie Bunyer; Nick Cherry; Nigel Cates; Oliver Smith; Phil McGilvray >>


facility. So if you go onto the website, there is a little chatbox. Where if you


click through, one of the advisors will have a video-link conversation with you. The customer has the facility to talk, but


they can see the advisor speaking to them. We have found this to be very successful, I think for two reasons. One is that we have a ready-made pool of trained Advisors, we have had to temporarily close our stores due to the Covid-19 lockdown so we had 1,000 experts available who were trained up and knowledgeable. The second part is that we have found


that we have this much deeper reach into customers, maybe customers who would have been uncomfortable on video calls before, but are now increasingly more used to them.


DJ: To get the best results, view the human and chatbot messages as part of the same conversation and blend them appropriately. The initial stage of the conversation may


be a chatbot handling the automation piece, and then it goes to an agent. But do not view that as ‘it is over with a


human agent, so the agent is managing it’, rather the key is to be able to pass backwards and forwards between a human agent and a chatbot depending on what the conversation requires. That gets you the best results from an automation point of view.


MO: From working with clients, we have seen where conversations start quite simple and as the conversation progresses becomes a lot more complex. The question is “is it appropriate for a


chatbot and technology to be able to handle complex conversations?” Probably not at the moment. More and more businesses, though, are starting to train their chatbots,


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and the technology is certainly there, so the chatbot is really starting to understand what the customer intent is. So, you can start to understand the


conversations more. This allows you to categorise or flag certain things, for example vulnerability. When you have the ability to do this you can then start to intelligently route conversations.


So, you can start to understand the conversations more. This allows you to categorise or flag certain things, for example vulnerability. When you have the ability to do this you can then start to intelligently route conversations


So today, we are only doing rather simple


parts – I call them the ‘structured’ parts of conversations, but some of our customers are on that journey to start building out their capability. That is something that you will find, during this year, a lot of movement is going to happen in that area, understanding what needs to be done and then guiding the conversation to the next best step. So maybe people are not doing it so much


today, but you will see that happen during the year – the technology is there, it is just about using it and taking that step-by-step approach, not trying to do everything in one go, and building up that knowledge in the chatbot, because they can be trained to do a better job over and over.


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HC: The question of intent is very interesting. We have certainly found that, if a customer knows exactly what they want to do and they are not in a vulnerable situation, then you can open that up to a number of questions ‘do you want to apply for another loan’, ‘do you want to know which retailers we work with’, or ‘do you require a payment holiday’, all of which is very achievable by using chatbots, but the key is to understand the customer intent and to pull out the ‘I do not know what to do’ conversations. We are a long way from replacing all


agent conversations, human empathy and rapport building are an essential part of the collections process that cannot be replicated by chatbots. It would be great in the future to be able


to use these bots in more complex scenarios and be confident that they would adequately give the understanding needed, but I have yet to see that. We have seen significant efficiencies by


introducing technology improvements, we launched inbound SMS chatbot functionality at Christmas and have continued to add sophistication to the process. Approximately 50% of these conversations


will involve some agent interaction, but that is not to say that they are solely being dealt with by an agent – it is more the case that a chatbot will deal with the early part of the conversation, switch to an agent if required, and then switch back to a chatbot, depending on the intent. Even prior to promoting this option,


beyond notifying customers visiting our website, we are finding that 10% of our inbound communications are choosing this digital channel. Moving forward, the opportunities to automate to gain efficiencies, are vast. CCR


February 2021


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