Case Study Effective Debt Management. Contact us Infracast Ltd, Merlin House Brunel Road, Theale, Berkshire, RG7 4AB T M W

Transcription

1 Case Study Effective Debt Management Contact us Infracast Ltd, Merlin House Brunel Road, Theale, Berkshire, RG7 4AB T M W

2 01 - About Infracast Infracast provides a wide range of enterprise messaging solutions built on our core EMX platform. We work in close partnership with our customers, helping to build and deliver effective, longterm communication strategies that are specifically tailored to each customer s unique business requirements. We currently process over 50 million messages each month, and have a rapidly growing international customer base that includes Telco s, Banks & Financial institutions, Airlines, Logistics and Retail businesses. From our origins in SMS text delivery within the UK Financial Services sector, we now have the capability to reach over 90% of mobile subscribers worldwide. Our entire ethos is based on customer service excellence our continued growth is built on customer recommendation and repeat business About EMX Enterprise Message Exchange (EMX) is our multi-channel messaging platform that combines high performance SMS, MMS, , Voice and Emerging Channel delivery with ease of integration and management. Extensive analytics enable customers to gain valuable insight and to make effective, real-time communications decisions. EMX is available as a fully managed hosted service delivered from redundant data-centres, run onpremise or on a hybrid basis.

3 03 - Introduction Infracast has worked with a tier one UK Retail Bank Banking Group since 2004, helping the Bank develop SMS Text Messaging as an effective channel for communicating with both customers and staff. We now host and manage the core messaging infrastructure that supports all of the Bank s customer alerting requirements. Since the first customer messaging application was deployed in 2004, the Bank s use of SMS has grown to over thirty distinct applications and services, consistently delivering in excess of five million messages each month across the Group. The services, built on the hosted Infracast EMX platform, are all closely integrated with the Bank s internal processes and applications, and have enabled the Bank to identify a series of spectacular ROIs in key business areas. Extensive reporting and analytics provide valuable group-wide insight and enable the Bank to continuously monitor and refine their customer communication strategy. SMS messaging now ranks alongside Digital Banking as a core component of the Bank s customer growth and retention strategy.

4 04 - Debt Management As part of their overall approach to risk reduction, the Bank was looking for a way of reducing the number of customer loan and credit card accounts that were going into arrears. SMS Text messaging was chosen as the primary communication channel. Personalised text messages are used as a targeted call-toaction, inviting customers to phone a call-centre number to resolve the situation with their arrears. The primary reasons for choosing SMS as the preferred contact mechanism were the immediacy of delivery and the fact that SMS is still regarded as a spam-free channel. The service also supports and Voice delivery channels. The key challenges were seen as: Reducing the time and cost of contacting customers by traditional means such as telephone or paper mail Deploying technologies in line with customer expectations and requirements Communicating in an effective and timely manner with customers who were in arrears or at risk of increasing their arrears Sending appropriate communications for the status and level of debt for each customer account Avoiding spamming or harassing customers with overly aggressive communications Managing the flow of customer responses into the Bank s call centres Adapting in near real-time to customer payments and other relevant account-changes The solution is based on a dedicated instance of the EMX platform, hosted and managed by Infracast.

5 05 - Solution Overview Prior to each working day, the Bank s core systems generate a number of message batch files containing details of loan and credit card customers who are to be sent payment reminders. These files are automatically transferred to Infracast and uploaded into the EMX platform for processing. Each batch file record contains the customer s contact details, the identifier of a pre-defined message template to be sent to that customer and any customerspecific information such as customer name or payment due-date to be merged into the template. EMX groups the merged customer message records by template and then formats and schedules the messages for delivery according to each template s rules. Bank staff can use the EMX Web Portal to review all messages uploaded for a given day prior to releasing messages for delivery to the network. A unique Bank-supplied message identifier can be supplied for each customer message, enabling the Bank to identify, monitor and update individual messages using the EMX Web Portal or via an API call. This enables the bank to cancel a reminder message or amend the text to a Thank you if the customer has made a payment prior to submission. This ability to react to changing customer circumstances in real-time reinforces the impact of the messages and helps strengthens the Bank s brand. The EMX Web Portal is used to create and manage message templates and to control submission of batches, template groups and individual messages in real-time. At the end of each processing day a status file is created that contains the completion status of all messages that successfully delivered or failed during that day. This status file is retrieved by the Bank using Connect:Direct, and is used to update CRM and core banking systems.

6 06 - Message Templates The solution defines several message templates for each operating brand, each reflecting a different approach to the different stages of an account being in arrears or over-limit. For example, the following templates might be defined: Dear $$name, your account ending $$acct was due for payment on $$refdate. Please contact us on if you are experiencing difficulty Dear $$name, your account ending $$acct has been passed to collections. It is important that you contact us on to avoid action Dear $$name, your account ending $$acct is over your agreed borrowing limit. Please pay $$payment by $$refdate Dear $$name, thank you for your recent payment. Please allow 3 working days for your account to be updated Mail-merge field placeholders are specified by the $$ prefix in the template text, and are matched with the corresponding values provided in the message batch file records. Delivery channel SMS Text, Voice or etc. Message originator e.g. PaymentDue, or Submission start time, end time, and how messages are scheduled during this window (e.g. Immediate delivery, at a fixed-rate or spread evenly across the day) Dynamic anti-social processing e.g. no night-time delivery or messaging at weekends or public holidays Message validity period - the time at which messages will expire at if they cannot be delivered immediately (for example, if the handset is switched-off or out of coverage) Brand, cost-centre and other billing and reporting information Access to templates and other system data is controlled by the customisable EMX security model. Users can be granted or denied access to system functions and data items according to business unit, brand or operating department. Additionally, custom access control permissions can be setup on a per-user basis.

7 07 - Authorising Account Payments In addition to sending reminder alerts, EMX also enables Bank customers to use two-way SMS Text messaging to authorise loan and credit card account payments from a nominated bank account. To use the service, customers must first register their nominated payment accounts details, mobile phone number and a memorable security keyword 1. Once registered, customers can send an SMS Text message containing their security keyword, last 4 digits of the nominated account number and the payment amount to a dedicated five digit SMS short-code at any time. The inbound SMS Text message is routed to the EMX platform for processing: The request is validated for correct format. An appropriate help message is sent to the customer in the event of an incorrectly formatted or invalid request EMX creates a time-limited customer SMS Transaction record. This unique identifier associated with this record is used in all subsequent data flow between EMX and the Bank s systems The customer is sent a summary of the transaction, and asked to confirm that they wish to proceed by replying yes, along with the unique transaction identifier If the customer sends a confirmation reply message within an acceptable time window, EMX makes a secure Web Services request to the Bank, passing the transaction details A payment confirmation (or appropriate failure message) is sent to the customers This process makes it extremely simple for Bank customers to make a payment against a loan or credit card account from their mobile phone in a highly secure manner. No actual account information or other personal data is sent in the text messages; the message is only used to authorise a payment between pre-registered accounts held by the same customer. Combined with payment reminders for customers in arrears, this simple, mobile payment mechanism has proven to be extremely effective in facilitating customer payments and reducing levels of debt. 1 Customer registration can be performed on-line, in-branch or using the Bank s Telephone Banking Services

8 08 - Service Reporting and Management Information The EMX solution provides a wide range of standard and bespoke data extract and reporting options. Standard reports including: Summary and detailed information of numbers of messages submitted, delivered, expired and failed Statistical analysis of delivery failure codes e.g. number of messages that expired, failed due to bad numbers or other reasons Payment request and confirmation messages. These reports can be customised to include cross-references to previous payment reminder messages Campaign statistics including responses, delivery rates and individual messages All reports can be filtered and grouped by Brand, Business Unit, Department, Period, Template, Channel, Originator and User. Bespoke reports and data extracts can be produced upon request. For example, the end of day status file is produced to the Bank s requirements, designed specifically to match the content and formatting requirements to be imported into existing Banking and CRM systems.

9 09 - Summary The Bank Group SMS Debt management system currently handles approximately 200,000 targeted messages each month. The Bank gained a rapid and early return on investment, recouping the initial cost of the deployment within 6 months of implementation. Overall, the Bank have reported a reduction in bad debt in the order of 20-25%. Taking into account the reduction in call-centre and external agency staff needed to undertake customer debt reminder and collection communications, the ROI is even greater. The ability to support ad-hoc SMS payment requests in response to outbound payment reminder alert messages provides a simple and extremely effective way of reducing customer arrears. By implementing targeted customer messaging solutions that can adapt in real-time to external systems and customer feedback, organisations can reduce costs and improve the effectiveness of their customer communications.