Hello! Welcome to Skit.ai. Click here to book a demo.

industry: Auto Finance

4 Ways AI Voicebots Are Transforming Auto Finance Collections

Posted on 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:

  1. Triggers the outbound call based on pre-determined criteria
  2. Establishes contact with the borrower (RPC) and reminds them about the payment
  3. Collects propensity data and reasons for potential non-payment
  4. If the customer is interested in making the payment right away, the Digital Voice Agent guides them through the process via a payment gateway
  5. Persuades the customer to pay at the earliest, or offers alternate payment plans
  6. Feeds data to the CMS (collection management software) and provides analytics for further action
  7. 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 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

  1. 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. 
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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:

  1. 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. 
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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. 
  6. 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. 
  7. Self-service Capabilities: Voice AI’s 24/7 availability with prompt response to queries gives customers control over debt repayment or auto finance process.
  8. Waitless Resolution: Digital Voice agents quickly disseminate information on products or loans, reducing wait time and elevating CX. 
  9. Personalized Responses: By delivering contextually accurate information specific to the use case, Voice AI ensures the responses are hyper-personalized with consistent call quality.
  10. 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. 
  11. 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.

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

Posted on 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.

Quick Links
Support
USA
  • 135 Madison Ave,
    7th Floor,
    New York NY 10016
By continuing past this page, you agree to our Terms of Service, Cookie Policy, Privacy Policy and Content Policies. All trademarks are properties of their respective owners. 2024 © Skit™. All rights reserved.