Debt Collection and AI Voicebots: A Use Case Which Is Proven

Voicebots continue to be a great option as a way towards efficiency for many types of industries out there that require extensive telephony. Voicebots in the past have been too robotic and have had such improvements throughout the years since their origination that they have become as natural as a regular agent.

However, with the advent of AI being such a prominent feature in Voicebots, the sound quality is not the only thing with improvement, but also the fact that the responses can also mimic the responses a human agent would give, and as there’s more data coming out, it will only help to refine the AI even further.

How it’s working in debt collection

With the fact that Voicebots are only getting smarter and can handle wider customer service-related positions, there's a new field we're starting to see vast improvements with. That is in the area of debt collection. While debt collection is a difficult subject to be positive about, it is a strong vertical and is a perfect business model for this technology. With the usage of Voicebots, they’re able to simultaneously handle much larger volumes of calls, so there’s much more efficacy and efficiency that occurs when using these voicebots.

Lets be clear, this is not new technology now, this is proven and currently running technology that it providing results every day for clients and businesses across the UK and Europe as we speak.

Start simple and effectively

With voicebots some of the easiest wins are simply connecting the calls in the first place. As you do not get any sort of charge for unconnected calls from the voicebot. Those that are simply uncontactable without voicemail for example, are not charged for. Once connected however, we will always have a conversation that leads to some sort of action, be it pay now or send a payment link.

This allows a very warm transfer to an agent team to simply process payments or payments are made automatically.

Yet what about the human factor?

It can be embarrassing to be in debt, but by automating it has been seen that the stress levels are much lower when it is clear that the call is a voicebot.

Also we’re talking about the negotiating aspect when it comes to debt collection. How will a voicebot know what to negotiate and what to confirm when talking about a debt they're trying to collect? There's still a big use case for this, and although this is a more complicated process, it can be handled as any other process from the data points available. So giving the voicebot a model, it will be able to negotiate with the best of them.

On top of that, there's always the path of escalation, if a customer is just not responding to payment requests, then a steady and consistent escalation of message is delivered in a firmer tone and with always compliant messages and clear sign posting on what will happen next.  

How good are the efficiencies?

The price of a voicebot, because they are charge per 15 seconds, will typically only cost you 30% of a human agent. Then you have to factor in how you’ll needless space, management, and electricity, and you're really starting to find cost efficiencies. Never mind acquiring the staff in the first place.

Also there is scale, there's already a case study showing a 362%increase in collections, simply because more points of contact are made with the same size or smaller team, who are generally only dealing with positive outcomes.

Additionally, for those who have debts that are usually a little small to collect with human agent teams only, even a hybrid model allows smaller debts to be collected for earlier settlement.

This ends up helping the customer because often, consumers may owe a debt, and at the time, it's not that big, and a simple voicebot call could remind them to pay it before it escalates into several thousand pounds worth of fees and collections.

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