December 2022

Solving Collection Agent Attrition and Scalability Issues for Auto Finance Companies

Posted on December 23, 2022August 24, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

The rapid growth of the automotive finance market—CAGR of 6.5% [2022-2028] and the likelihood of reaching USD 385 bn with the rapid growth of 42 Billion in market size, indicates the opportunity ahead. But growth needs to be supported by resources, and the skilled workforce is the most scarce.

For decades auto financers have struggled with the shortage of skilled human support executives. Although various automation solutions helped them move closer to automating most of their workflows, it was far from getting realized.

With rapid advancements in voice technology by vertical Voice AI companies such as Skit.ai, we have reached a point of seamlessly automated customer conversations and significantly reduced the dependence on human agents.

We have deep-dived into various aspects of how Skit.ai’s voicebot impacts the Top and Bottom Line. In this piece, we will explore how Skit.ai’s AI-powered Digital Collections Agent will solve one of the most significant scalability problems arising from the skilled labor shortage.

The Challenge of Scalability and Seasonality in Auto Finance

Labor shortages and retaining a skilled workforce are big challenges in auto finance. Like other industries, the pandemic also affected automotive and finance companies, leading to employees’ reluctance to return to their jobs and re-evaluating their life priorities in the post-pandemic stage. As a result of the shortage of skilled human resources, the industry is riddled with the following:

Higher cost of recruiting, training, and retaining good performers
Inadequate debt portfolio coverage
Higher cost of collections or recovery
The limited scalability of the auto loan portfolio
Overworked human collectors or agents might lead to compliance breaches
The direct link between the auto loan recovery team and the number of accounts
Also, seasonality is a significant issue. For ex., during festive seasons, most collectors or agents are on holiday, so keeping the show running during that phase becomes highly challenging.

In addition, collection agents face many challenges that make their job highly challenging. Here are a few core challenges the agents and companies face while trying to ensure the consumer gets back to the payment schedule:

Disengagement: High volume of dull, low-value, and repetitious calls make it challenging for the agents to be motivated and carry excitement while on the job. Simplistic calls about FAQs, wrong numbers, calls not picked up, call-back again requests, and more create zero value but consume a lot of time for agents. This monotony is at the core of their disengagement from work.

Recruitment and Training: Finding the right person for the job, training them regularly, and giving perks and incentives to retain their cost dearly to the auto financing companies. This cost and management issue can be thoroughly minimized with the deployment of Skit.ai’s voicebot.

Compliance Adherence: Debt, even secured ones like auto loans, come under a regulatory framework, and sometimes overworked agents tend to use coercion or not stick to regulatory restrictions, leading to litigations and non-compliance.

Inadequate Portfolio Coverage: Agent team and bandwidth are limited, and they need to optimize the ones with the maximum probability to pay, and thus others get ignored. This is a loss because a fraction of others will also pay if followed.

Handling Call Spikes: Seasonal fluctuations in calls, inbound or need for processing debt portfolio expeditely, needs seamless scalability else it is a missed opportunity that affects the performance of the auto financer. To have scalability, auto financers have to manage a bigger team of agents, which will be an enormous cost for them, hence an unfeasible alternative.

How Skit.ai’s Digital Collection Agent Solves Skilled Agent Shortage

At present, tools at the disposal of auto financers involve dated technology such as IVRs, and telephony that can not decouple incoming calls from human agents. At best, the tech solutions just alleviate the core problem to the slightest.

Voice AI, the most cutting-edge voice technology, on the other hand, holds the most promise. There are various kinds of Voice AI solutions available in the market. Still, only voice-first Vertical Voice AI companies such as Skit.ai deliver voicebots that perform under the most testing of situations.

Here is how the Voicebot of Skit.ai empowers auto finance companies, solving 7 core challenges. You may also want to explore how Skit.ai’s Digital Collectors impact the top and bottom lines of auto finance companies.

As promised, let’s deep dive into how our voicebot will help your company solve the problem of a shortage of skilled human agents forever:

End-to-End Automation: Our voicebot is extensively trained in the domain of collections and is capable of answering over 70% of customer queries without escalating them to the human agent. These simplistic queries are mostly a waste of human agent time, and when the customer expresses the willingness to pay, the voicebot can enable on-call payment.
Potential for Much Higher Collections: Since the voicebot frees a significant amount of agent bandwidth, it can be used to process additional or new loan portfolios; thus, there is the possibility of a higher top line. In short, the same team of human agents can now deliver much higher collections revenue.
Reduction in Average Handling Time: The shorter the calls escalated to a human agent, the more productive they will be. Skit.ai’s Digital Collection Agent collects relevant information such as:
1. Seeks information to verify the identity of the consumer
2. Captures the disposition or the problem
3. Solves a part of the question and then escalates the complex part to the human agent
4. Improves the accuracy of information divulged by the agent as it already furnishes factual information pulled from the CRM and other systems.
Focus on Real Issues for Better Collections: The human agents can focus on the highest value and complex cases where they can use their expertise to troubleshoot and improve repayment rates.
No Call Volume Spike for a Balanced Work-life: Since Skit.ai’s AI-powered voicebot can answer any volume of calls, and since the voicebot entirely answers a majority of them, the actual increase in the workload is a fraction of the total increase. This improves the quality of work in real terms.
Lower Concerns for Compliance and Litigation: For auto finance companies that deploy Skit.ai’s voicebot, the possibility of entering into litigation is very low because
1. For one, the voicebot does not go off script.
2. The probability of a person filing a litigation being irked by a machine is very low. This is a big plus.
3. Thus when the voicebot engages a majority of calls, the chances of litigation are negligible.
Better Customer Relations: Customer relations are built on touch and connection. The human agents can use the voicebots to schedule interaction touchpoints that foster a deeper relationship. The result of this is better collections due to customer satisfaction.

Voicebot for Limiting Dependence on Human Agents

From the above list of unique benefits, it is clear that the voicebot, by answering a majority of calls and making outbound calls with end-to-end automation, reduces the dependence on human agents significantly.

Today, auto finance companies can deploy Skit.ai’s state-of-the-art voicebot in less than 45 minutes and see their collection outcomes improve within weeks, not months. Many debt collectors have realized our solution’s indispensability and gained a competitive leg up. It is time to change!

To learn more about how Voice AI can help support your human resources and scale their collection efforts with call automation, schedule a call with one of our experts or use the chat tool below.

How Auto Finance Companies Can Improve Collections with Skit.ai’s Voicebot

Posted on December 21, 2022August 24, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

The economic volatility is affecting auto financers directly, and so do the inflation and other consumer behavioral trends, making it a genuinely complex space to be in.

Inflationary pressure is mounting significantly in the US economy, and the core inflation jumping to 6.6%, a 40-year high; on the other hand, the US economy is slowing down significantly, putting significant pressure on consumers to avoid delinquencies, which are now at historic highs.

Adding on top of these macroeconomic stresses for auto financers is the acute skilled labor shortage. The cumulative effect has made auto financers scout for automation solutions that can solve their challenges on all fronts.

Before Voice AI, no tech had such a capability that could automate collections and customer support calls without the need for agent intervention. Today, we are crossing the call automation rubicon with Voice AI solutions such as that offered by Skit.ai.

How Voice AI Can Empower an Auto Financing Company with Call Automation

A voicebot is a conversational Voice AI solution that can engage in meaningful conversation with the customers and understand what they are saying, having been trained extensively for particular business support issues. The design of the entire conversation is done, keeping in mind all the possible difficulties a customer can encounter and how best the collection process can be optimized.

So for every customer query, the voicebot has a ready answer as it pulls out relevant and accurate information from the client system and informs the customer, reducing the duration of the conversation remarkably.

Before we deep dive, here are a few salient points that must be borne in mind:

Our voicebots, also known as Digital Voice Agents, are trained extensively for specific business problems and hence are capable of engaging in intelligent conversations.
Our voicebot can handle all tier-I disputes, around 70% of customer queries.
The remainder of calls, nearly 30%, are escalated to the human collector after the voicebot has established and verified the person’s identity and captured disposition. Thus saving human agent time and helping them engage in high-value tasks.
The cost of a voicebot is less than 1/5th of the human agent cost. Thus, overall pure cost savings are humongous.
The voicebot can place thousands of calls concurrently, thus reducing the dependence on human agents considerably.
Our voicebot can be deployed within 45 minutes, making the results tangible and fast.

The impact of our voicebot on the top and bottom lines is well-documented and clear.

Extrapolating results from Skit.ai’s clients with similar use cases, an auto finance company can realize impressive recovery rates at a fraction of the cost.

Before we explain the nuances of our tech, you can take a minute to watch our voicebot in action.

Voice AI for Inbound/Support Calls

Inbound calls are gold mines because of these; a fraction of customers have called to pay and perhaps need assistance in processing their payment.

Present Status Quo or Before Voicebot Deployment: Unfortunately, most auto financers cannot answer a significant portion of incoming customer calls because of a lack of skilled human agents and due to the prohibitive costs. This a considerable opportunity miss.

After Skit.ai’s Voicebot: Every call gets answered, the intent gets captured, and willing consumers are facilitated to make on-call payments. Any query or dispute gets immediately noted or resolved. Also, details of any further follow-ups are recorded, and calls are scheduled.

Voice AI’s Impact:

All the clients of Skit.ai experienced the following:

Better collections as willing consumers were facilitated with payment options
Better disposition and intent capture
Improvements in their CSAT scores
Better customer experience as financiers can listen and record every customer query.

Voice AI for Outbound Calls

The capability to dial prompt and perfectly timed calls to reach out to overdue and delinquent accounts is perhaps the most significant capability an auto financer can have. The reason is that almost all auto financers with diverse portfolios have faced the problem of limited scalability and portfolio penetration.

The search for automation has always been, in essence, to ease the problem of limiting the scalability of dialing outbound or consumer reach-out calls. Outbound IVRs and other telephony solutions have eased the problem in their limited way. But only with Voice AI do auto financers experience call automation or intelligent automation of consumer calls.

Present Status Quo or Before Voicebot Deployment:

At present, auto finance has a limited number of agents that can place a call for collections. The process begins with an SMS reminder for payment, followed up in due course of time with a call made by an agent, and then depending upon the significance of the account, the subsequent follow-ups. Agent attrition and compliance breach always have auto financers wary of pushing things.

The diversity of auto loans in the portfolio increases the number of calls that need to be made. This leaves a significant part of the debt portfolio unattended.

After Skit.ai Voicebot:

Before you read further, listen to our voicebot in action and how easily it can help consumers pay.

Our voicebot addresses one of the most significant pain points of auto financers—scalability. We have empowered collectors to dial millions of calls within a week if they so desire. This means that reminders for every overdue or delinquent account will be reached out by our voicebot at the right time, at the desired frequency, and even help them make a payment or reschedule their payments if the need arises.

This means that simplistic calls such as reminders and notification calls can be done by the voicebot, which can even capture intent and help agents prioritize accounts.

This seamless scalability in outbound calls empowers collectors tremendously and can take their recovery rates and portfolio coverage intensity to new heights.

Voice AI’s Impact:

Repayment Rate at par with an average human agent
Better overall collections at a fraction of the cost
Human-Agent Bandwidth Optimization
Cost of Collections slashed to less than 1/5th
Portfolio Coverage of 100%
Seamless Scalability that leaves scope to increase portfolio with the same collections team
Better compliance as the voicebot sticks to the script

Summarizing the Overall Transformation

The distinct advantages of a Voice AI solution such as that of Skit.ai are conspicuous and indubitable, as many collectors have realized tangible benefits quickly. The impact of this technology is truly transformative and has begun to disrupt many businesses function, such as collection and customer support.

Though our solution can be incorporated in less than 45 minutes, the competitive leg up for early adopters is as significant and can impact long-term success.

If you found our technology relevant and exciting, feel free to schedule a meeting with one of our experts using the chat tool below.

Voice AI: The Biggest Contact Center Automation Trend of 2023

Posted on December 20, 2022August 24, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

The Ongoing Boom in Voice-led Technologies Across the Globe

Voice has always been the preferred means of communication for human beings. That’s why a shift toward voice-based technologies is making its way across generations and geographies, in particular when it comes to contact center automation trends.

In 2022, there were an estimated 123.5 million people using voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa in the United States. A survey conducted by Statista in early 2021 showed that nearly one in three (32%) U.S. consumers own a smart speaker. Consumers are using voice features for online searches, shopping, dictation, and more.

This phenomenon is noticeable across the globe. In India, for example, the number of people using voice queries on Google on a daily basis is nearly twice the global average. With higher consumer adoption of voice-led searches, the incorporation of voice technologies in CX strategies is now a business imperative.

A Deloitte study revealed that, by 2030, there will be a proliferation of voice-led technologies around the world, with 30% of sales happening via voice. Additionally, given the ongoing economic uncertainty, there is a risk in not investing in new technological capabilities during a downturn, as stressed by MIT research.

The Growing Challenges of Customer Support and CX

There is a growing demand for new voice-led solutions to deliver better customer experiences.

Until recently, IVR solutions and chatbots have played a central role while not excelling at CX. The traditional bottlenecks limit the ability of companies to properly serve their customers. Among these challenges, the scalability of support teams and cost issues are among the most pressing.

Given the plateaued capabilities of the legacy systems, companies have begun to pin their hopes on new technologies such as Voice AI, hoping to disrupt the status quo once and for all.

Here are some of the most common challenges contact centers are currently facing:

High attrition rates: Even the best contact centers are struggling to retain talent. Agents often quit due to frustration with their jobs or as soon as they are offered a better position elsewhere.

Scalability: Call volume fluctuates, going up and down depending on the season and demand for customer support. It’s very challenging for managers to scale their teams up and down according to these changes.

Weak Customer Experience (CX): The vast majority of consumers will confirm this — IVR is highly unpopular! IVR systems typically reroute customers through nightmarish flows, ending up with long wait times to speak with a live agent who can effectively solve the given problem.

High operational costs: Agent costs, infrastructure, talent hiring, training, and retention all add up, costing companies a fortune.

It’s not a surprise, therefore, that customer frustration is on the rise. Nearly 9 in 10 people say they prefer speaking to a live agent over the phone rather than navigating a pre-set menu (IVR), according to research by Clutch.

Contact Center Automation Trends: The Solutions Available Today

Here are the most prominent tech solutions available today for contact centers to automate their interactions with customers:

IVR (Interactive Voice Response) Systems: IVRs may have been game-changers when they were first introduced decades ago. Today, not so much. Most IVR systems are created to reduce call volumes or prevent callers from reaching a live agent. They do not easily differentiate between customers and their intent, leading to time-consuming flows and frustrating results. Additionally, confusing navigation menus and poor integration capabilities can lead to a big mess for the company. This is not to say that IVRs do not add value, but they do not contribute to a positive customer experience.

Chatbots: For companies looking for a cost-efficient solution, and companies whose products or services have a less linear user journey, chatbots can be an effective solution. Chatbots are particularly popular now because of the increasing demand for self-service customer support solutions. Additionally, they are easier to train than voice-based solutions, and they provide 24/7 customer support at a low cost. Chatbots can also work with audio and visual media.

However, also chatbots have their shortcomings. First of all, they miss out on two core pillars of customer experience—emotions and ease of use. It is impossible to convey emotions over text. Also, it can be challenging for many users to type repeatedly, especially if the users are not tech-savvy, older, or in atypical situations.

Voicebots: This solution, powered by Voice AI, can handle countless, human-like interactions simultaneously, enabling users to reach a time-sensitive resolution without the need to interact with a live agent. Voice AI agents, also known as Digital Voice Agents, are capable of authenticating users, looking up relevant information, and quickly resolving customer queries in just a few minutes.

Voice AI can handle many different tasks and use cases across industries—from changing a flight itinerary to booking a table at a restaurant, from filing a complaint to making an on-call payment; users can get the support they need without waiting in line while having to listen to some hideous tune.

While many people might confuse the two technologies, it’s important to remember that IVR and Voice AI are different technologies.

Augmented Voice Intelligence vs. Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa

Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are considered to be the gold standard for voice automation; yet, it’s important to remember that these technologies are built for one-turn, simple and generic interactions. All they do is answer a question or a request by the user. That is why they are not suitable for customer support, as it requires reliance on context and the ability to handle several turns of conversation.

Digital Voice Agents, powered by Voice AI, are trained for thousands of hours on specific customer issues. They are trained to understand the vocabulary, the decision process, and the solutions to offer. Unlike voice assistants, which are designed to provide a single answer to the user’s question, Digital Voice Agents can handle multiple rounds of questions and answers. These are ideal solutions for customer-centric companies.

Listen to Skit.ai’s Voice AI Agent In Action

Why Voice-led Solutions Will Transform Contact Center Automation

A Stanford Study revealed that speech recognition software writes text messages more quickly than thumbs, stressing the ease of voice-led conversations over typed exchanges.

Chatbots bundled with Automated Speech Regognition (ASR) technology are able to transcribe the user’s speech, but they can’t handle an actual conversation. When it comes to voice interactions, only voice-led solutions can provide the ultimate customer experience.

As organizations pour millions into automated voice support, they want their virtual agents to understand the semantics of a conversation—even sarcasm. Those subtle nuances of human conversations get annihilated when we strap a readily-available ASR over a chatbot. A simple conversion of text to voice and vice-versa does not meet the standards of a voice conversation.

The attrition among call center employees is extremely high. Seamless collaboration of human and machine intelligence — as we call it at Skit.ai, Augmented Voice Intelligence — is the future of work. Voice AI is perfectly poised to augment live agents and enhance their capabilities.

Human beings prefer to do meaningful tasks that create value. By taking away a chunk of repetitive and low-value tasks, a Digital Voice Agent helps human agents focus on significant and complex tasks. Also, a Voice AI platform can provide live agents with the context of previous interactions, helping them perform remarkably better and feel engaged with their work.

Take Your First Step

How does the adoption of Voice AI impact the operations of a contact center? Here are a few examples:

Automation of up to 70% of phone interactions with customers
At least 50% reduction in operational costs
Over 4.5 CSAT
Up to 40% reduction in average handling time
Actionable insights and analytics to make data-driven, informed decisions

Now ask yourself these questions:

Are your live agents busy with zero-value, repetitive tasks?
Are you constantly facing challenges related to cost, compliance, or resources?
Do your agents feel that they could perform significantly better with the proper tech support?
Is customer experience a priority for your business?

If you’ve answered “yes” to any of these questions, then it’s time for you to consider Voice AI for your contact center.

For more information about how Voice AI can impact your business, schedule a meeting with one of our experts using the chat tool below.

4 Ways AI Voicebots Are Transforming Auto Finance Collections

Posted on December 20, 2022September 4, 2023 by Simone Somekh

There have been a total of 13.7 million car sales in the U.S. in 2022, according to an IBISWorld estimate. Car sales have been declining since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic due to many factors, including the growing prevalence of remote work, supply chain issues, and a looming recession.

As a consequence, interest rates have been rising significantly, hitting over 6.0% and negatively affecting the number of car sales. With higher prices, bigger loans, and higher interest rates, comes an increase in delinquencies. It has become an issue for many auto finance companies to keep up with the high number of delinquent borrowers.

In this article, we’ll discuss how Voice AI (the technology behind a voicebot) can transform auto loan collections in different ways.

What Is Voice AI?

Also referred to as a voicebot, Voice AI is a technology that enables companies to automate calls with customers from start to finish without requiring the involvement of a human agent.

AI-powered Digital Voice Agents are capable of handling intelligent conversations with users. The technology understands what the user needs and helps them effectively resolve the issue in just a few minutes. Voice AI should not be confused with Outbound IVR (Interactive Voice Response), a dated technology that consumers tend to dislike.

Auto finance companies that perform collection calls are now turning to Voice AI to automate many of the repetitive, tedious calls they used to perform manually and allow their live agents to focus on more complex and revenue-generating tasks. The Digital Voice Agent engages with the borrower, verifies their identity, and collects the payment on-call, covering up to 70% of the company’s outbound call volume.

To better understand what Voice AI is, think about Siri or Alexa, but for collections. However, there is one difference. While voice assistants like Alexa can only handle one or two conversation turns, a solution like Skit.ai’s Digital Voice Agent is designed to address issues that often require several conversation turns. Just like humans need to gather the context before solving a problem, a Digital Voice Agent might ask multiple questions before proposing a resolution.

What Are the Most Common Uses of Voice AI in Auto Finance Collections?

Voice AI is just one of the many artificial intelligence trends that are taking the auto industry by storm. Its ability to automate collection calls and other common types of outbound calls to borrowers is particularly appealing to auto finance leaders looking for ways to cut contact center costs and maximize profits.

Let’s dive deeper into the four most common uses of Voice AI (the technology behind Skit.ai’s Digital Voice Agent) in auto finance collections:

Welcome calls: Lenders and auto finance companies typically deliver an initial “welcome call” to borrowers to let them know that they are servicing the loan or in charge of collecting payments. While these calls are important, they are not revenue-generating and utilize the precious time of the company’s live agents.

Skit.ai’s voicebot solution can easily initiate an outbound call to borrowers to deliver the message and then answer some of the customers’ most common questions.

Payment reminders: Auto finance agents typically spend most of their time calling borrowers to remind them of payments that are due soon or payments that are already overdue. Reaching borrowers is not always a straightforward process! Agents have to establish right-party contact, explain who they are, and remind the borrower about the payment. When the volume of loans increases, it can be challenging for managers to scale the contact center to fit the need of the moment.

Skit.ai’s Voice AI solution can offload up to 70% of the calls from live agents, handling payment reminders automatically. Skit.ai’s clients have even reported that some borrowers prefer to interact with a voicebot rather than a human agent, as it can be embarrassing for them to discuss pending payments and the risk of going delinquent. The voicebot can easily establish right-party contact, remind the borrowers of the due balance, and offer different ways to pay it off.

On-call collections: The end goal for any collector is to recover the payment from the borrower; if the borrower is willing to make the payment on-call, even better. While this part of the process is directly revenue-generating, it still takes time and resources to complete.

Skit.ai’s Digital Voice Agent has the capability to collect the payment during the call, making the process significantly cheaper for the company servicing the loan. The collection is processed through a payment gateway of the company’s choice.

Autopay or ACH sign-up: Many auto finance companies servicing loans initiate outbound calls to borrowers to offer them to sign up for autopay. With autopay or ACH, borrowers can automate payments from their credit card or bank account so that they can be processed on a regular basis.

Skit.ai’s Digital Voice Agent can easily call borrowers, explain how autopay works, and offer them to sign up on call. This is an ideal scenario for auto finance companies, as it ensures a regular cash flow.

How Do Auto Finance Collections Work?

Now that we know what Voice AI is and the main use cases in auto finance, let’s go over the main steps of a standard collection call handled by one of Skit.ai’s Digital Voice Agents.

The voicebot follows these steps:

Triggers the outbound call based on pre-determined criteria
Establishes contact with the borrower (RPC) and reminds them about the payment
Collects propensity data and reasons for potential non-payment
If the customer is interested in making the payment right away, the Digital Voice Agent guides them through the process via a payment gateway
Persuades the customer to pay at the earliest, or offers alternate payment plans
Feeds data to the CMS (collection management software) and provides analytics for further action
Performs auto-callback on request, auto-retries, hot transfer to agent

Are you interested in learning more about how Skit.ai’s Augmented Voice Intelligence platform works and how your auto finance company can adopt it? Schedule a call with one of our experts using the chat tool below!

Voice AI Helps Auto Financers Reboot for Better Customer Loyalty and Retention

Posted on December 20, 2022August 24, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

Today, every CXO working in auto finance knows it takes just a few online searches and clicks to buy a vehicle. For an industry primarily focused on customer-centricity, auto finance companies are suddenly up against “seconds-to-minutes” worth of digital interactions to wow their customers for better engagement and retention.

Inflation in the U.S. is adding a new set of challenges, with rising interest rates, vehicle prices, loan delinquencies, and predatory competition, making the current landscape particularly complex.

Prospective car owners seek online financing options for the speed, convenience, and wealth of online information to make a decision. Their digital savviness intensifies the demand for fast-paced digital finance with seamless customer support. Auto finance companies must rethink every touchpoint and communication channel across the customer’s journey.

Ensuring customers stay satisfied throughout their auto lending journey is a complex task.

In this article, we’ll explain what Voice AI is and how it can add significant value to the customer experience (CX) in the auto finance industry. Skit.ai’s Voice AI solution can help auto finance companies automate various types of calls, starting with collection calls and payment reminders.

7 Auto Finance Use Cases with Voice AI for Better Customer Experience

Welcome Calling & Onboarding: Our Digital Voice Agents plug into contact centers to handle Tier-1 calls that are mundane and repetitive. These intelligent voice bots are tailored to send automated welcome messages, assist customer onboarding, and share loan-related information like interest rates, loan eligibility, loan approval, and payment details.
Payment Reminders: Auto loan providers can leverage Voice AI solution to set triggers for personalized, outbound payment reminder calls of any volume for loan payment, EMI dues, interest rate updates, and document submission.
DPD 30-60 Collection: (DPD).Voice AI helps place thousands of automated, proactive, and timely calls concurrently without requiring human intervention or needing to scale human support teams. This is useful for auto finance collection cases involving consumers who have missed EMIs for 30 to 60 Days Past Due. The prime customer gets a grace period; late payment fees are waived, and credit scores will not be affected. These are the benefits that customers experiences which make ultimately result in better CX.
Auto draft Signups: Auto draft is like enache. Prime customer who is of the age of 50 and above still pays with a cheque or visits the bank. For them, auto-pay setup is essential to avoid penalties. In turn, it contributes to the convenience essential in enhancing CX and increasing customer loyalty.
On-call Payment Assist: Digital Voice Agents can provide prompt on-call payment support to consumers by automating responses for Tier-1 calls and transferring only complex calls to human agents. The analytics and data on consumers’ loan accounts and payment histories also help collectors to have better insights for answering various consumer queries and providing on-call payment assistance.
After-Hour Business Services: Voice AI helps auto finance companies provide 24/7 live customer support services to answer consumers’ queries about payments, loans, due dates, and more at any time of the day. Especially useful for calls made after business hours and for handling simplistic queries, while the other issues, such as disputes and other issues, are captured and updated with relevant CTA.

11 Ways Voice AI Drives Up Customer Loyalty and Retention

The critical aspect of Voice AI in auto finance is to help companies against common operational pitfalls that can lead to potential and existing consumers slipping away to their competitors. Our Augmented Voice Intelligence platform allows auto finance companies’ contact centers to augment their support teams to unlock the best of its live collectors and Digital Voice Agents to serve many use cases, delivering superior CX. These further translate to customer retention and loyalty in the following ways:

Higher Customer Engagement: Digital Voice Agents call automation; up to 70% of calls help reach the right consumers at the right time and frequency. This helps auto finance companies supercharge their engagement rate with current customers and onboard potential customers.
Better Brand Advocacy: As per the 2022 J.D. Power study report on Consumer Financing Satisfaction, existing customer relations are the low-hanging fruits for auto loan providers to leverage. Captive lenders reportedly outperform non-captive lenders with higher NPS. Voice AI helps engage with existing customers who are twice as likely to consider their current lender for their next vehicle purchase.
Scalable Customer Support: Reminders at the right time and to the right person, with 1000s of concurrent calls, helps auto lending companies engage with thousands of callers across loan portfolios at a fraction of operational costs.
63% Faster Customer Query Resolution: Companies that implemented Voice AI in their contact centers were able to reduce 63 percent of the query processing time for better customer retention and satisfaction at 67 percent, as per a study by Ecosytm.
Proactive & Diverse Support: Voice AI is customized for various functions and call automation capabilities to help the customer support teams to cater to diverse customer queries like payment collections, customer signups, document verification, loan approval, and purchases.
Augmented Human Support: By leveraging call automation and intelligent voice bots’ ability to provide prompt resolutions to tier-1 calls, auto finance companies can empower their contact center agent teams to save time and resources, be productive, and focus on high-value tasks that need actual voice conversations with customers in times of their need, translating to better CX.
Self-service Capabilities: Voice AI’s 24/7 availability with prompt response to queries gives customers control over debt repayment or auto finance process.
Waitless Resolution: Digital Voice agents quickly disseminate information on products or loans, reducing wait time and elevating CX.
Personalized Responses: By delivering contextually accurate information specific to the use case, Voice AI ensures the responses are hyper-personalized with consistent call quality.
Better Customer Intelligence: Auto finance companies can make the customers feel heard by unlocking a treasure trove of customer insights from data and robust analytics dashboards to improve the overall customer experience and call quality.
Higher Compliance: Collectors in the auto finance industry must be aware of core federal laws relating to auto loans and consumer communication, including HIPPA, FDCPA, FCRA, TCPA, and more. Voice AI’s algorithms are trained to adhere to consumers’ laws on privacy and compliance best practices which are critical for building a positive brand image.

Voice AI Represents a Breakthrough in Auto Finance

The automotive industry is slowly evolving to build excellent customer journeys against the digital boom, rising consumer demands, and data ubiquity. A look into the future shows no signs of slow down in consumers’ expectations for digital and phygital experiences in auto retail and finance. Voice AI is poised to make contactless car buying a reality in the era of driverless cars!

To learn more about how Voice AI and Digital Voice Agents help reimagine customer support and collection in auto finance, schedule a call with one of our experts or use the chat tool below.

Human Collectors vs. AI-powered Digital Collectors: An In-depth Comparison

Posted on December 8, 2022August 24, 2023 by Harshad Bajpai

Voice AI is becoming mainstream in the ARM industry, and the days of chasing after customers for unrecovered debts in the most haphazard, manual fashion are nearly over. Additionally, thanks to the rising popularity of self-service channels and the ecosystem-led push involving regulatory changes like the Reg F that rewrite the expectations for debt recovery in the U.S. beyond simple automation.

Voice AI conveniently fits the bill for debt collection agencies by fixing the systemized inefficiencies with automation and analytics-driven voice communication outreach. In this article, we will explore why human-like voice interactions handled by AI-powered Digital Voice Agents help debt collection companies drive effective consumer interactions at better collection cost, performance, and efficiency ratio.

7 Ways Voice AI Helps Elevate Debt Collectors’ Productivity

At Skit.ai, we call it Augmented Voice Intelligence — the idea that Voice AI can augment, rather than substitute, the work of live agents and collectors. Let’s dive into the benefits of this strategy:

Human-like Conversations: Voice AI is purpose-built and modeled on human conversations. Digital Voice Agents can hold thousands of outbound customer outreach calls simultaneously, without the involvement of human collectors, helping collection agencies carry out human-like interactions at lesser cost and effort from their human resources.

Seamless Integrations: Voice AI’s integration features feed data from collection calls, such as right-party contact, call-back requests, no response, and more, into the collection management system to provide actionable insights for human collectors to be more proactive.

Higher Portfolio Coverage: Collection agencies can leverage Digital Voice Agents to scale collection outreach calls for different consumer accounts and across diverse portfolios with unique requests for payment alternatives, call-back options, or preferred time of contact.

Versatile and Accurate: Intelligent voice bots can be tailored according to the use case, offer profound insights for analytics on future actions, independently schedule automated triggers, auto call-back on request, and even make intelligent call transfers to human agents/live collectors for complex issues.

Better Compliance and Privacy: Voice AI’s algorithms can be trained to follow regulatory protocols on reaching customers, communication time, frequency or calls, and honoring their requests for discontinuing communication using APIs. It can be challenging to adhere to all the norms when done manually. Also, Voice AI’s strong encryption and consumers’ or cardholders’ data protection features comply with regulatory standards like HIPAA, PCI, FCRA, and more.

Lower Litigation: Voice AI lowers litigation risks compared to human agents, who are more likely to coerce consumers to pay with the hope of meeting targets and receiving higher commissions. Additionally, consumers are generally passive toward Voice AI and pin fewer expectations on the technology to understand their emotions or personal grief, reducing the odds of agencies ending up with lawsuits.

Better Insights and Analysis: Debt collection agencies can draw on the insights gathered by Digital Voice Agents to learn about consumers’ or callers’ experiences and conversations to design or augment debt collection processes for better collection campaigns, collectors’ experiences, and higher recovery rates.

How AI-powered Digital Collectors Can Outperform Live Collectors

While Voice AI embodies the promise of automation with a human touch, collection agencies don’t rely on anecdotal evidence. They look for value-creation and tenacity to transform traditional loan recovery practices with the technologies to a level that human resources alone cannot match. Skit.ai firmly believes in realizing the potential of voice communication in debt recovery by augmenting human support with AI for intelligent human-machine collaboration.

Here are the key differentiating features of Voice AI that match collection requirements and make processes more efficient in responding to various outbound debt collection use cases.

Collection Support Scalability: Voice AI can automate up to 70% of calls, helping curb hiring, recruitment, and training-related requirements in collection agencies. Additionally, Digital Voice Agents help leverage unlimited scalability by simultaneously handling multiple collection calls, which would otherwise be very time consuming and expensive when done manually.

Higher Cost Savings: Voice AI processes non-revenue generating calls at 1/5th of the cost of manual calls. Also, they are capable of decreasing operational costs by 50%.

24/7 Support: Digital Collectors can always be at the beck and call of consumers to offer 24/7 support. Delivering 24/7 support with human resources would be extremely costly and unrealistic.

Lower AHT: Voice AI guarantees better performance and can handle multi-turn conversations with prompt query resolution. It reduces average call handling time (AHT) by 40% and augments human agent teams’ efforts by transferring only complex queries and equipping them with real-time analytics and insights.

Higher Debt Collection and Recovery Rate: Skit.ai’s Digital Collectors have repeatedly demonstrated performance at par with average debt collectors while operating at less than 1/5th the cost of a human agent.

Better Account Classification: Unlike manual debt collection efforts, Voice AI’s ML classification models algorithms are trained to segregate consumers as per bankruptcy details, creditworthiness, outstanding loan amounts, blocked accounts, and do-not-call lists, to help collectors or accounts receivable managers respond appropriately.

Higher Accountability and Compliance: Digital Voice Agents are trained to comply with strict practices in debt collections (7/7/7 rule, TCPA, Mini-Miranda, etc.) and refrain from the usage of unsavory language or behavior that can later result in lawsuits to the agency, which would be challenging to regulate in manual collection use cases. Besides the analytics-driven insights on consumer responses and history, Digital Voice Agents guarantee higher accountability.

Complete Campaign Control: Digital Collectors can be turned on or off as per use case to match the call volume requirement or type of consumers’ requests and accounts, unlike calls by live collectors with efficiency issues and too much time, resources, and training.

Consistent Call Quality: Voice AI delivers consistent experiences at any scale and volume. It is humanly impossible to ensure the call experience remains the same and guarantees similar outcomes for all debtors’ conversations from manual collection campaigns.

The Bottom Line: Voice AI is the Key to Supercharge Debt Collections

It is time to embrace the reality that neither automation nor pure human intelligence can help debt collection agencies to master complex collection campaigns. Skit.ai’s Augmented Voice Intelligence platforms like Skit.ai enable the collaboration between humans and AI-powered machines to respond to the mounting operational stresses in debt collection agencies. These solutions empower live collectors to perform consistently throughout the debt collection process at a better cost, productivity, and recovery rate.

To learn more about how Voice AI can help reimagine debt collection efforts with call automation, schedule a call with one of our experts or use the chat tool below.

Voice AI: The Answer to Every Major Auto Finance Collection Challenge

Posted on December 7, 2022June 21, 2024 by Simone Somekh

Auto finance companies dealing with collections face a pivotal moment of seemingly unprecedented activity.

Here’s what’s happening right now: car prices have hit a record high, interest rates are skyrocketing, and — as a consequence — the auto finance industry is facing a high number of delinquencies. As they find themselves with very high numbers of loans, lenders and collectors have to drastically scale up the number of outbound calls to borrowers.

While challenging times are not always fun, they also allow us to think outside the box and come up with innovative solutions. In this article, we’ll go over some of the major challenges related to auto finance collections and explain how Voice AI and call automation can solve each of these problems.

A growing number of auto finance companies are starting to look to Voice AI (the use of automated voicebots) as the go-to solution to handle both outbound and inbound calls with customers and borrowers. In particular, voicebots are used for collection calls and payment reminders.

Voice AI-powered Digital Voice Agents can handle human-like conversations with users, eliminating wait times and enabling a much larger number of calls to be handled at the same time. A Voice AI technology like Skit.ai’s Augmented Voice Intelligence platform allows auto finance companies to handle collection campaigns at a fraction of the cost.

Challenge 1: Scalability

Auto loan volume varies significantly depending on the year and the season. Anyone who has been in the industry for a while can tell you that they’ve seen very busy seasons as well as quieter ones. Because of the unpredictability of these changes, it can be difficult for an auto finance company to easily adapt and scale either up or down. When facing a particularly busy period, auto finance companies need the ability to quickly scale up to handle larger volumes of loans and customers.

How Voice AI can help you solve this challenge: Voice AI enables auto finance companies to scale up and down with just a few clicks, deploying as many Digital Voice Agents as they need depending on the year and season. As soon as loan volume goes down, the company can simply scale down its use of the Voice AI solution.

Challenge 2: Cost

Collections can be an expensive process. Agents or collectors typically have very large portfolios, with many accounts to reach out to; because the process still tends to be manual for the most part, it takes time. Additionally, if your collectors take a commission, that can also reduce profits.

How Voice AI can help you solve this challenge: By automating the collection process, Voice AI can significantly augment the work of your live agents on the floor, contact many customers simultaneously, and massively reduce costs. Additionally, an AI-powered Digital Voice Agent does not take commissions!

Challenge 3: Hiring and Training

A poorly-trained team of agents and collectors can be a recipe for disaster. As new loans pile up and many become delinquent, it can be tempting to throw new employees into the midst of the action; but if the agents are not qualified and they are not familiar with the existing laws and regulations, you might find yourself in trouble in no time.

How Voice AI can help you solve this challenge: A Digital Voice Agent requires minimal training at the very beginning of the deployment process. After that, you can easily tweak its conversational flows and capabilities with just a few simple changes to the Voice AI platform, either on your own or with the help of your provider.

Challenge 4: Talent Shortage

Since the pandemic and the Great Resignation, many industries, including the auto finance and debt collection industries, have been faced with a shortage of talent. The lack of human capital poses serious challenges to auto finance companies, whose teams and management need to deal with overwhelming workloads. Attracting talent can be a costly endeavor.

How Voice AI can help you solve this challenge: Automation is the answer to the human capital shortage. Voice AI can fill the gaps created by the lack of talent and help the existing team members handle the most repetitive and mundane calls. The adoption of a debt collection software like Skit.ai’s platform can solve this problem in a very short time.

Challenge 5: Agent Attrition

While it’s hard to define the exact attrition rate in the collections space, from talking to many companies operating in both the collections and the auto finance industries, we know that attrition is a real challenge for them. In a 2016 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau survey, large debt collection agencies reported an average turnover rate of 75% to 100%.

Agents and collectors are often dissatisfied, frustrated, and understimulated, so they hop on to the next job opportunity as soon as they find one, whether it’s because the pay is better or because they think the work will be more rewarding.

Every time your company loses one team member, you’ll have to undergo the process of recruiting, hiring, and training a substitute, which can be costly and time-consuming.

How Voice AI can help you solve this challenge: A Voice AI-powered agent never gets tired of handling repetitive and mundane tasks. With the help of Voice AI, you can also focus on retaining your existing talent, as you can ensure every team member has the opportunity to focus on more rewarding and complex tasks.

Challenge 6: Compliance

The collections industry is affected by so many laws and regulations that, if you haven’t been in this space for a while, it can be overwhelming to understand what you can and cannot do. How often can you call borrowers? Are there any times of the day you can’t call them? What do you do if a borrower asks not to be contacted again? How do you handle the privacy of your customers? How should you safely process payments?

These questions are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to compliance! Think about the TCPA, the FDCPA, the SCRA, PCI standards, and so many others. Additionally, some of these regulations vary depending on the state where the borrower resides.

An auto finance company pursuing collections must be well-versed in these rules and should stay up to date, as lawsuits abound and regulations change relatively often. Better safe than sorry!

How Voice AI can help you solve this challenge: Digital Voice Agents, unlike live agents, don’t go off-script, misspeak, or get confused. When they are trained to follow a set of regulations, they just stick to it. With the help of Voice AI, you can let the solution do the work while you handle other tasks.

Challenge 7: Recordkeeping

For an auto finance company, few things can be more disastrous than poor recordkeeping! Especially when it comes to collection efforts, notes, documentation, and records are crucial. That’s why total reliance on manual recordkeeping is at best risky and at worst harmful. Collectors should keep track of each interaction with their borrowers so that they can follow up and make progress with each new conversation.

Additionally, other team members — such as fellow collectors and managers — should be able to easily access the notes and track the progress made with each account. Automated notetaking is one possible solution to tackle this challenge.

How Voice AI can help you solve this challenge: A Voice AI platform automatically keeps track of all customer interactions, taking notes of every conversation and capturing payment disposition and propensity to pay. With Voice AI, you get to automate conversations with borrowers, and you can be fully aware of the background and context of each account. Whenever a live agent wants to take over, they can easily do so by looking at the record of the relationship between the auto finance company and the borrower.

Are you curious to learn more about how Skit.ai can transform your auto finance operations, customer interactions, and collection efforts? Schedule a free demo with one of our experts using the chat tool below.

Year in Review: Skit.ai’s Most Notable Moments in 2022

Posted on December 6, 2022August 24, 2023 by Simone Somekh

2022 has been a pretty eventful year for Skit.ai! In this article, we will re-live some of our company’s most notable moments in the U.S. in 2022, including media mentions, award recognitions, and more. This was an exceptional year for our company and the Voice AI industry at large. Get a cup of coffee or tea ready, and join us as we go down memory lane!

Skit.ai Establishes New NYC Headquarters

The year was marked by the announcement of Skit.ai’s new New York City headquarters.

In the announcement, Skit.ai’s CEO Sourabh Gupta said: “We’re continually listening to our customers, conducting market research, and making enhancements to our artificial intelligence system to deliver a best-in-class solution that helps contact center agents offer modernized and reliable customer service, leaving a lasting impression and positive satisfaction rate for their company. We look forward to expanding our U.S. customer base and building new relationships to help elevate the customer experience, optimize costs, maximize operational efficiency and increase company revenue.”

Skit.ai Mentioned in the Washington Post

In the summer of 2022, Christopher Elliott, a reporter at the Washington Post, quoted Sourabh Gupta in an article about customer service in the travel industry. The piece explained that Skit.ai develops an artificial intelligence-driven voice technology.

Gupta was quoted saying, “Travelers should look for companies that offer round-the-clock assistance and a way to reach key information, even when human support agents might not be available.” The article continued: “You can tell your travel company has this by looking for a ‘contact us’ feature on its site that offers 24/7 phone, chat and email support.”

Skit.ai’s Big Win at the CCW Excellence Awards

In July 2022, Skit.ai was given the “Disruptive Technology of the Year” award at the CCW Excellence Awards Gala held in Las Vegas. The event is part of Customer Center Week and recognizes “the most innovative companies and top-performing executives for their extraordinary contributions to the customer contact profession.”

Upon accepting the award, Gupta said: “We are thrilled to be recognized by CCW. This award underscores the reason for our existence – to improve contact center operations, so both the agents and customers have a more seamless experience. Being recognized for the most disruptive technology solution in contact center operations is a reminder of why we all come to work each day. We’re excited for what the future has in store for our company and the industry at large.”

Skit.ai India Certified as a Great Place to Work®

In August 2022, Skit.ai’s Indian branch was certified as a Great Place to Work® for the year 2022 in the mid-size company category.

As part of the Trust Index Employee Survey conducted by GPTW, employees ranked the company favorably on parameters such as Credibility, Respect, Fairness, Pride, and Camaraderie. The certification affirmed the company’s core cultural values of striving for excellence, being a learning organization, building a client-first mindset, exercising constructive disagreement, and fostering commitment at work.

Skit.ai Named Among Best Business Technology Solutions at the International Business Awards

In August 2022, Skit.ai was honored with yet another award in the United States. The solution was named a Bronze Stevie Winner in the Business Technology Solution: Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Solutions category as part of the International Business Awards.

This award recognized Skit.ai’s Augmented Voice Intelligence Platform as an innovative technology solution that fuels effortless contact center conversations to manage customers’ needs more efficiently and painlessly.

The Stevie Awards are the world’s premier business awards that honor and generate public recognition of the achievements and positive contributions of organizations and working professionals worldwide.

Skit.ai’s Other Notable Media Mentions in 2022

CMSWire quoted Skit.ai’s CEO Sourabh Gupta in an article about the ways the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the Voice of the Customer. Gupta said: “Especially in customer service roles such as restaurants and stores — employees have reported that customers are more demanding than ever before. With many employees in this industry switching to better-paying industries, this only increases customer frustration as these establishments try to find help.”

In another article, CMSWire asked Gupta to share his insights on how AI is shaping the future of customer interactions. “With Voice AI, brands can cut down on customer wait times, shorten the time they spend on the phone, and effectively answer their questions faster,” said Gupta.

TechBullion published an extensive interview with Gupta, who shared his vision for the company and the conversational AI industry at large. “Our vision in creating the company is to elevate customer experiences and lay the groundwork for the future of voice interactions,” Gupta said.

Also VentureBeat featured Skit.ai in an article about the ways AI predicts hurricanes and answers calls for help in their aftermath. The reporter noted that, “with emergency hotlines, hospitals and utility call centers being inundated with calls, speaking with a voicebot during a time fraught with anxiety and fear can help.”

“In a sensitive or dangerous situation, Voice AI can be used to provide customers with crucial information in real-time, answer questions and redirect the more complex calls to a human agent,” Gupta told VentureBeat.

Last but not least, Authority Magazine published an extensive interview with Gupta conducted by Tyler Gallagher. In the interview, Skit.ai’s CEO discussed his personal journey, his vision for the company, and the AI industry’s current challenges.

We are looking forward to an even more exciting and productive year in 2023!

Hungry for more? Follow our page on LinkedIn and stay tuned for many more updates in 2023. Happy New Year!