Payment Rescheduling Process Demo

Krista White:
Good morning, Gordon. And thank you for joining us on YouTube Live today. I see that you are surviving well in the COVID-19 world of no haircuts.

Gordon:
I was ahead of the game on that one.

Krista White:
So today we're going to be talking about processing payments in the world of COVID-19. And so this was something based on a project that we did for a customer where they had about a week to turn around responses to the extensive number of people calling about COVID-19, and payment delays and things like that. So, why don't you just jump right into it today?

Gordon:
All right. Thanks, Krista. (silence)

Gordon:
All right. So, we were thinking a bit about in the light of this COVID-19 crisis, how are our own clients being affected by the crisis and how are their customers being affected as well? And how can we help in a positive way? So, one of the things that keeps coming up with our customers, even with some of them before this crisis started, was they've got a huge amount of call volume coming in from their customers, and it's very expensive to talk to your customers on the phone. So we wanted to think about how digital process automation can help our customers and our clients reduce that call volume and reduce the amount of handling time that each customer requires. So if we're thinking specific to the COVID-19 crisis, and we're thinking about just consumers in general, individuals, it's not news for us to tell you that there's an unprecedented strain on individuals here. There's over a 10% jobless rate and social distancing and stay at home orders have caused people to avoid restaurants and avoid spending money on a lot of the things that normally they would be spending on.

Gordon:
And just in general, people have some fear about how they're going to pay their bills over the next coming months here if they're unable to find employment. So this is pretty obvious here, but from the perspective of our own customers and our own organizations that we work with, this means that we have a lot more people calling because that fear about payment leads customers to seek out questions. So, most obvious here is some customers need payment assistance so they may not be able to pay their bill this month or next month, potentially. There's also just general fear, which leads to additional questions and higher average handle time when we are talking to a customer. So that means if we're spending more time on the phone with customer A, we don't have as much time to answer questions for customers, B, C and D, which leads to long wait times for those customers.

Gordon:
To make matters worse, the stay at home orders have reduced the capacity at many call centers, whether it's here in the US or overseas. So if people normally sit in an office to answer the phone, they no longer can do that. So we're having to be creative about how people are able to answer those calls. And the reality is, we simply don't have as much volume to answer the phone.

Gordon:
So with all that being said, work volume for our call centers are far exceeding capacity at a time when we really don't have the ability to increase our capacity. So that's really the question that we wanted to address here with this new offering and a use case that we want to talk about here. So, if you think about it, one way to reduce call volume is to improve your digital relationship with your customers. So if the customer can find an answer to their question on your website or on their mobile app, there's no need for them to call. That's going to make your customers happier, and it's also going to reduce that high call volume that we've been talking about here. So I've got a demonstration I want to show that illustrates some of the ways we can improve that digital relationship with our customers and reduce that call volume.

Gordon:
So when I pull up this demonstration here, keep in mind, this demonstration is in the context of a bank. Now we do work with a lot of banks and this is a pretty good use case to show for a bank, but it's not a [inaudible 00:04:58] use case here. You might imagine that this goes for a credit union, for car loans for example. This could even be for something as simple as utility bills or really anything where the customer has to pay a bill. So what we're looking at here is the customer's homepage. They see a list of their accounts, and we've added a small notification at the top here saying, "Our phone and email response times maybe longer than usual due to COVID-19." So just kind of a casual, passive reminder there. But if we click on our mortgage and again, it doesn't have to be a mortgage.

Gordon:
This could be any kind of account where the customer has payments due. This mortgage now has a more detailed message at the top saying, "Do you need payment assistance due to COVID-19?" So this gives the customer a chance to begin an assessment and determine whether they are eligible to change the way that they're paying their bills. And again, there's no need to make any phone calls or really have any human involvement yet from the bank's side. So when we click on that link, there's actually some decision management happening in the background. So we have an engine that will crunch the numbers. You can see that this customer has already signed in, so we're signing this Jonathan Lewis. All of Jonathan's information obviously is in our system. And so what we've done when Jonathan clicks the beginning assessment button is we've made a decision call, an API call, to pull back the options that are available to Jonathan under his circumstances based on his profile, his accounts, his payment history, and all the other information that we have about him.

Gordon:
So we've got a couple of things here at the top. First of all, and we've got a friendly message. And the first piece of information that we're presenting to Jonathan is that late fees are waived. So if you're worried about paying your bills a few days late, or a week or two late, there's no need to call anyone. We're letting the customer know right up front, there's no action needed, they won't be charged a late fee, and their credit score will not be affected. So that's right there in front. Down at the bottom, we also are giving Jonathan two different options to actually take some action and change the way that he's going to pay his bills in the coming months. On the left side, he has the ability to reschedule payments. So this will essentially defer some of his loan payments to the end of his loan.

Gordon:
He also has the option on the right to renegotiate the terms of this loan. So actually, if he wanted to, could refinance his home mortgage and get some cash right away, so that is an option that is available to Jonathan at this time. The example that we want to focus on today is the rescheduling of payments because I think that's going to be the most common and the simplest option for most people. So let's click on, "Apply to reschedule your payment." Again, we're going to see a quick loading screen because we're making another call back to our decision management engine. And this will determine what options within the rescheduling of payments option are available to Jonathan. So based on Jonathan's customer history and account details, he is eligible to defer up to six mortgage payments, and we can see, right in front here, that if he wants to skip one or three payments, there's no fee.

Gordon:
For skipping six payments, there may be a fee, and we'll go down that road in a few minutes here. But let's first look at the simplest option here. Let's say Jonathan just needs to skip one loan payment. If that is the case, he's asked one more question just for our own records here. "Is this due to loss of income, loss or reduction of employment, or illness?" So we'll go with loss of income and we'll click submit. And what we see now is a confirmation screen. So there have been no humans involved on our end to make this happen. Jonathan didn't have to get on the phone. He was able to take care of skipping one month payment and putting it at the end of his loan with just a few clicks on the website. So, you can see he's got some updated information here. He doesn't owe anything for the next month.

Gordon:
He won't be charged late fees. He won't have his credit score affected, and we can also see the new maturity date for his loan has moved back by one month to May 20th, 2047. He also has the ability to download confirmation forms for his records, and he can also view those later from his statements page. So all of this information is right here up front. Jonathan can rest assured and he can get back to his busy, daily life. Now I do want to click through this one more time with the slightly more complex option. So if we go back to the mortgage here, we begin our assessment. And this time, let's ask to reschedule this by six months. So we might be in a situation that's a financial organization where the six month option has a bit more risk on our end, and so we need to collect a little bit more information as well.

Gordon:
So we have the same first question, "Is this due to loss of income, reduction of employment, or illness?" But we also need to know, "Does Jonathan reside inside the property? How many people reside there? And does anyone living there have a disability?" We could add any number of questions in here, but we thought this was a pretty representative sample. When I click submit now, we're going to again, make that call to our decision engine. And what we get back here is a couple of options for Jonathan. So first of all, we have determined that further investigation is required for Jonathan to receive six months to deferment a payment. And so we're just going to let Jonathan know that upfront, because we also have determined that if he had chosen the one or three month deferment, he would be able to go through and get that approved without any manual approval.

Gordon:
So we were letting Jonathan know that right up front, and he's got a link here to kind of go back and request one of those options if he wants a really quick solution here. If he knows that he wants that six months solution, he can use option two here, which is to accept his terms and conditions and click submit. And when he does this, we've now kicked off a process in the background, which again, we're using digital process automation in the background, and we're basically saying, "All right, we're going to take all of Jonathan's information and we're going to run it through our payment deferral process," which involves a couple of different approval levels by actual humans.

Gordon:
This still does not require Jonathan to get on the phone with us, but it does require some manual approval, so we're going to take about five business days to review his information. And Jonathan will receive a word back from our automated system at that point. So again, this is a slightly more complex case. There is some manual intervention required, but it doesn't require us to get on the phone with anyone. It doesn't require Jonathan to either. And everything's of being handled in the background in a way that can be tracked or a later reviewed by our team. And in a way that assures that every step in the process is taken and taken at the right time.

Gordon:
So, overall, hopefully this gives you an idea of how we can help you using digital process automation to make your customers happier, and also reduce some of that strain on your call centers. And again, as we have gone through this, this was a banking example, but I just want to remind you, this is something that would work for any kind of payment system. So again, whether that's auto loans, home loans, or perhaps utility bills, phone bills, any kind of bills that people might need to pay, this type of approach could work. Some of the details would be different obviously, but we hope this gives you some sense of how we can help you improve your situation on your customer's situation through this financial crisis that we're in.

Krista White:
So Gordon, you mentioned a couple of times during this demo, decision management within the process of deciding if this person was eligible. Is that something like a business rules engine behind this?

Gordon:
Yes, that's exactly what it is. So we have a business rules engine that is driving the information that the customer sees on the page. Depending on which customer is logged in, they will receive different options. And we have... If you want to, we can schedule a followup. If we have people on the phone or on YouTube right now who want to see some more details about how the decision engine works, we'd be happy to show that to you. But essentially, we've got four different business rules that have been built back there and they handle things like we give the customer a score, so it's sort of... Sorry. The customer is standing with the company based on their payment history and their current risk profile. We also get information about what they're eligible for directly, so that would show which options are available on these pages. So we'd be happy to talk that through with you if you're interested.

Krista White:
And of course, this is... One of the questions in the chat today is customized to our own processes and policies, because of course, if this was a real process, there'd be many more than four variables that we'd be looking at. So we can customize this to our own banking policies and processes, right?

Gordon:
Of course. And that's the whole idea behind a business rules engine is we're building out those policies in an executable format. So it makes it so that your other systems can make those calls to the decision engine and get a response back. But the way the rules are written is in a way that can be understood by people, by regular business users. So there's a special language in there that makes it read kind of like English. And so you can kind of type that out and it's a way for basically humans and machines to speak the same language there.

Krista White:
And of course we can change those at will, so when the government regulations change, we don't have to change our whole process. We can step into the rules engine and change those within there and that'll deploy to the process.

Gordon:
Exactly. We have customers who make changes daily or even hourly to their business rules, so it's a great way to make your business more agile. And that kind of leads into the idea that this is a great opportunity for you to improve things during the COVID-19 crisis, but really, this is a way for you to become a more mature business going forward. And there are many uses for this outside of a crisis that can help you get an edge on your competition during normal business times.

Krista White:
Nice. Well, thank you Gordon for coming over today and talking to us about rescheduling our payments, something that is on the top of mind for a lot of consumers and of course, a lot of businesses. We really appreciate your time.

Gordon:
Thanks, Krista.