Case Studies
Real-life examples of how Aryza Engage helps businesses
Snap Finance is a UK-based provider of point-of-sale finance solutions, helping customers spread the cost of purchases through flexible repayment plans. With a focus on responsible lending and inclusive access to credit, Snap serves a wide range of customers and retail partners across the UK.
Snap Finance, one of the UK’s fastest growing consumer credit companies relied heavily on phone calls to engage with customers with many implementing various tactics to avoid taking calls.
This resulted in higher contact costs and agent resources required to collect payments and hampered the business’ ability to scale and meet growth targets.
A conversational message solution was designed to eliminate customer pressure to talk with agents, giving customers the ability to engage in a less intrusive manner.
Fully compliant automated AI agents were developed to lead early-stage outbound-SMS-messaging. This starts customer conversations with a view to resolving issues during a messaging conversation with an agent or flagging a site visit. Eliminating the pressure for customers to talk to agents resulted in customers responding with more consideration given to their responses.
Adding ‘I&E’ and ‘Change of Circumstances’ conversational form functionality enabled agents to send these forms directly within a customer chat. Customers have the option to discuss payment plans and fill out required forms. Agents are now only calling to customers they need to, with home visits being shorter and less costly.
Aryza Engage was highly effective during emergencies. Getting agents working remotely and deploying a proactive ‘Repayment AI Agent’ to manage thousands of payment reductions and holiday requests. Designed to ascertain if customers’ income was reduced and worded empathetically, the AI agent guided customers through an ID&V process determining ability-to-pay and if a holiday was required, then scheduling an agent-call.
Affinity Water supplies over 3.89 million people and families with clean and reliable water and provides an average of 950 million litres of water each day to their customers across a wide area of the South East of England.
Looking for better ways to communicate with Developer customers, Self-Lay Providers, NAV partners, and homeowners regarding service installations for building projects, Affinity Water needed a customer engagement technology tool to assist in providing excellent customer service and improving the customer journey.
Over time, they recognised that their customers were shifting to digital messaging channels and avoiding phone calls, and were experiencing low engagement rates which led them to conversational messaging specialists, Aryza.
A conversational SMS messaging AI agent strategy was developed to handle the massive spike in inbound customer queries, proactively reach out and guide anxious customers through a simple, efficient and timely engagement process.
The Developer Services Team now engages with their customers in an immediate and meaningful way via automated digital conversational messaging directly to the customer’s mobile phone in a familiar messaging channel resulting in improved response rates (2% to over 20%) and customer engagement rates (increased by 100%).
Following the success of digital messaging for the Developer Services Team, Affinity Water broadened its use of the Aryza Engage customer engagement platform to optimise campaign scheduling and expand across the group to include Communications, Reactive Incident Teams, Customer Support and Debt Management.
The Communications team uses digital messaging to provide customers with advance warning of upcoming work in their area that could impact them, as well as associated information sessions, reducing in-bound phone contact. The platform also enables the team to develop targeted campaigns that seek to increase awareness of key services, such as the online account portal.
High volume digital messaging provides critical support in managing and responding to water-related incidents, such as leaks or supply disruptions. The system can swiftly notify customers about incidents, provide regular updates, and offer guidance on steps to take, thus enhancing transparency and trust. This well-organised communication helps to minimise the impact of incidents on customers and results in quicker resolutions.
The Customer Support Centre uses Engage in a similar way to the Reactive Incident Teams. Whilst their team uses this for unplanned incidents and supply interruptions in a reactive manner, Customer Support use Engage in a proactive manner, for high-volume messaging to advise of planned M&R works that may affect specific areas with traffic management or for just general awareness that Affinity are working in the local area.
Integrating the Engage digital messaging platform within Customer Support has led to a significant uptick in customer service dynamics.
This technology allows the team:
Contact customers with timely and accurate information regarding their water services.
Handle routine messaging, which then frees up human agents to focus on more complex issues, enhancing overall efficiency.
Consistent and rapid communication increases customer satisfaction, leading to an improved customer service experience.
Affinity Water uses Engage's messaging solution to schedule and send SMS messages to its customers relating to their debt payments and debt management.
Smart Scheduling delivers an intelligent way to manage campaigns to use resources best, for instance, throttling campaigns and controlling the speed of message delivery to manage volumes according to agent capacity.
Conversational AI is adept at understanding and responding to customer queries and provides personalised interaction while offering 24/7 support and reduced wait times. Additionally, Conversational AI assists in gathering real-time feedback and insights from customers, which is invaluable for refining strategies. For debt management, the AI’s data-driven approach also helps identify customers who might be at risk of falling into arrears or are in a vulnerable position, enabling proactive engagement. This improves debt recovery rates and enhances customer relations by providing support and solutions tailored to individual financial situations.
Success Metrics
Response Rates: Average responses rates have gone from less than 2% to over 20%
Engagement Rates: Overall engagement with customer base has increased by 100%
Conversation Automation: 40% of customer conversations are completed by Engage bots
Affinity Water are utilising Aryza Engage in many of our customer teams to keep our customers informed. We work in a reactive environment and having a user-friendly system to text customers when we have a service failure gives us the opportunity to inform customers in as little time as possible, whether it’s 10 or 10,000, we can do this in minutes!
Hoist Finance, one of Europe’s largest financial services companies wanted to improve its ability to reach out and engage with customers in new and efficient ways. With WhatsApp’s 84% market penetration rate in Italy, Hoist Finance recognised the opportunity of engaging conversationally from both the business and customer perspective.
Working with Aryza, Hoist Finance introduced WhatsApp for Business as a new digital engagement channel, enabling customer conversations to be handled more naturally and efficiently - meeting customers where they already are and improving overall responsiveness.
Fully compliant automated AI agents were developed to lead early-stage outbound-SMS-messaging. This starts customer conversations with a view to resolving issues during a messaging conversation with an agent or flagging a site visit. Eliminating the pressure for customers to talk to agents resulted in customers responding with more consideration given to their responses. Adding ‘I&E’ and ‘Change of Circumstances’ conversational form functionality enabled agents to send these forms directly within a customer chat. Customers have the option to discuss payment plans and fill out required forms. Agents are now only calling to customers they need to, with home visits being shorter and less costly.
When faced with the need to rapidly move to a remote-working model, Hoist Finance successfully transitioned their agents to home working and messaging over WhatsApp in a matter of days, with minimal impact on operations or customers. To get up and running, the company needed to add lots of remote agents, which was done in less than an hour. Initially, a changing IP issue was impacting agents’ ability to log-on. This was overcome with some quick development on an IP Subnet. An accomplishment which even the Hoist team were amazed at given the situation facing the company and the country. The team were back conversing with customers over WhatsApp messaging and seamlessly managing higher than usual customer queries in no time.
Customer Engagement: Increased customer engagement with new conversational channel
Agent Engagement: Managed more customer conversations end-to-end versus over the phone
Customer Experience: Speed of resolution dramatically increased
With WhatsApp being the most popular messaging platform in Italy, I’m convinced that our customers will appreciate that they can now communicate with us through their favourite platform
