The current economic environment has many banks and lenders bracing for more turbulence. Rising interest rates continue to take their toll while loan delinquencies continue to rise.
In the face of these challenging times, helpful solutions are available that make use of the latest AI technologies.
Afiniti is an AI company that uses AI to improve interactions in the contact center, often the front line of support when customers face financial stress. Afiniti is helping banks manage those risks, close the gap on collections, and build trust with customers, all at the same time.
Afiniti’s proprietary AI technology and approach to pairing customers and agents enables lenders to improve the performance of their operations without increasing headcount, while ensuring a quality customer experience.
Interactions with financial institutions can be challenging for customers and agents alike, especially when it comes to collections. Debt causes financial and emotional stress, and collectors may not be equipped with enough information or time to be empathetic. These conditions aren’t ideal for the customer, agent, or business, which may lead to unsuccessful customer interactions, financial hardship, and revenue loss.
Traditional contact center operations do not factor in the quality and importance of interpersonal connections when routing customers to agents. Many companies tackle call traffic as a matter of volume, matching agents and customers on a first-available basis — resulting in agent-customer interactions that miss the mark when it comes to problem solving and understanding.
Afiniti takes a different view, giving organizations the ability to squeeze more value from every human-to-human interaction. Afiniti’s AI technology works by matching each customer with the agent who’s most likely to solve their problem, based on historical patterns of success.
With this approach, Afiniti helps lenders create better connections between their collection agents and their customers, improves the customer experience, and delivers better outcomes for the bank and the customer. A better customer experience, facilitated by an agent who understands your customer’s problem, has a profound impact on the retention of a customer, and the value of fostering long term relationships.
Improving agent performance and the rate of payments collected are business benefits that naturally appeal to lenders, who seek to improve customer lifetime value. Making tailored connections helps foster these relationships between agents and consumers, addressing both the need for empathy and a measurable return on investment.
Afiniti gives clients the ability to see the direct effect of its technology on their contact center’s success by using a unique benchmarking methodology. By turning its technology on and off continuously throughout the day, Afiniti is able to demonstrate the precise difference in performance against certain metrics when the technology is turned on versus off. And Afiniti typically only charges clients a proportion of the difference, using a pay-for-performance model.
For lenders, the results can be significant. Improved customer experiences not only lessen the tension of a stressful interaction, but also produce more satisfactory outcomes for everyone involved. With intelligent, real-time pairing, collectors and agents are able to deliver better results while reducing the strain that comes with their job — a win-win.