Customer centric and channel flexibility is key to engagement – [FULL INTERVIEW]

0:02
So hi, everyone. I’m here with Darren Swailes today from Saascoms, who’s Director and co founder, and you’re in the digital communication space. So Darren, thanks very much for joining me this morning. Yeah, good

0:12
morning, Chris. How are you?

0:14
I’m okay. Thanks. Yes, good, lovely weather we’re having. So it’s been, it’s nice to it’s nice to catch up and find out a little bit, I suppose what you’re seeing in terms of the digital space and the calm space, I know, you do lots of different things. But um, but I mean, what are the trends you’re seeing with customers at the moment, we’ve been through the pandemic, and there was that sort of drove a lot of sort of digital interaction. And we’re sort of out of that now. But it feels like it hasn’t stopped. And we’re just chatting before this about how busy it seems.

0:37
Yeah, I totally agree with you, if you look at our customers, there was a digital shift, I think, is the buzzword that was there before the pandemic. And the pandemic came along, just threw fuel on the fire, it was an absolute catalyst for moving to digital, suddenly, the environment, have everybody working from home, companies need to be able to contact their employees digitally, and still get them to work and engage. So everything was over this digital environment. And yet, our business accelerated massively as this, I guess, anybody in this space, but it hasn’t stopped. I think we’ve all learned to different way of working now. People work from home, two, three days a week, go into the office, there’s an entire different ethos into the way we approach our work.

1:24
We talked about the pandemic, it’s almost almost like to the nth degree. But do you think it’s changed since it’s since we’ve sort of come out of it? Because it feels like we’re getting back to normal, more of a sort of normal kind of business pattern bit by bit? Do you think it’s fundamentally changed? But do you also think that maybe the mix of channels is kind of changing now as well, and you sort of evolving even since even in the last sort of six months or so?

1:46
Yeah, I think I think the pandemic taught us all a new normal, you say we’re back to normal. I think the pandemic was long enough that what we learned there, and how we adapted and evolved during that period has become the norm. And I guess we all wondered, when the pandemic was over? If it is, so that argument we could have separately, but let’s consider that we’re out of it. And would we go back to how we did business previously? And from what we see, the answer is no, we haven’t, it hasn’t changed at all.

2:20
I mean, it kind of feels like there’s a lot almost like a bit of maturity in terms of like, how we mix channels together, that some of those themes are sort of starting to come through? How do you mix different channels together? How do you sort of sequence channels? How do you blend everything together, and it’s almost like we’re, as we’ve understood it more, we’re reaching almost like a higher degree of understanding or expertise around how to think about digital.

2:44
I think a lot of our customers in the financial and collections arena, and their challenges always and often getting somebody to talk to them that potentially might not want to, or might feel embarrassed or whatever, and suppliers into this market space, you typically have your letter producers, traditionally send paper letters out, make phone calls to people through a dialer. So you have dialer, providers, mail houses, and then you have the digital people who are competing with those two others. And traditionally, every each one of those categories of supply or say this is the way to do it. And we don’t take that approach, we say it needs to be a blended method, one person that will react in one way or respond to one contact method won’t to another. And that’s very varied. So I guess what we say to our customers is you’ve got to have or you’ve got to give your customers choice. Give them the ability to contact you how when they want to. And that will always vary. Somebody might read an email late at night, but it could be shopping at Tescos at three o’clock in the afternoon and quickly respond to attacks as they’re walking around. It’s just so varied, Chris, that one, one solution doesn’t fix the problem. You’ve got to have a suite of services.

4:05
So do you think that’s a question around flexibility though? It’s like flexibility and your contact channels and how you sort of become flexible to be able to handle all the different ways of interacting with customers? Yeah, it’s no,

4:15
no new customer customers are busy customers that have completely different preferences. If I look at the collections side of it, some customers will be happy to take a call and ring up and speak to a live person about their debt or their financial issues. Other people will find that just too hard to handle too embarrassing. So they’ll want a more detached contact method. However that might be but to actually move away from that person to person. It could still be a live person, but having that separation by doing it over web chat, for example, takes away again that any embarrassment factor, so it’s just giving these customers the choice of how they want to contact you what makes them feel better. They’re more likely to engage

4:59
and especially how Do you find that clients are sort of separating those different types because it feels like some people want to have a call versus that sort of like longer sort of feedback kind of response that you might have, say, with messaging as an example. But they’re quite different contact methodologies and have quite different dynamics. And if you get one in the wrong part, then it can cause frustrations for customers. I mean, how do you find that, that your clients really sort of understand, which goes to, and from a segmentation point of view,

5:27
I think initial contact, a lot of our clients, the initial contact is to reach out, that can be by a simple text message. But that text message will give the customer multiple ways to come back in and engage so it’s inviting engagement. And let’s say we look at we you’re aware, we provide a an omni channel contact product, which is agents logged into a screen, and they can see inbound contact that can be inbound could be the first contact, or it could be an inbound response to something that was sent out from the business. But that can have things like WhatsApp, web chat, email, SMS, all plugged into that one product. And if the customer comes in on the front end, you’ve obviously got a chatbot, that does all the heavy lifting. And the idea of that is that it gives the person contacting a very rapid way to self serve. So if they’ve got simplistic questions, then you can have them answer straight away. But what you’re then doing is funnelling down to talk to an actual person. And that can be based on their message content, their customer type, who collecting on behalf of, etc, and bring that into a live person. And by taking all the heavy lifting away, what you’ve done is free up your agents to to have those lengthier engagements. And they will often be concluded via digital messaging. But they might be moved off onto the phone, for example. So we will see digital chat that the agent goes a certain way. And then the person says it’d be a lot easier for the torching no problem, we’ll make a call and it’s pushed out to call. So to answer your question, there’s those multiple channels, and it shifts even during a contact session.

7:11
So it’s almost like it’s like that funnel around, start off here. But you’re trying to funnel it down to the agent, which is expensive resource, but do that when it’s needed, and getting cheaper alternatives are easier and quicker alternatives as well. Whereas not really, I think

7:24
we from an agent perspective, when you go in and say we’re going to bring in a digital solution. And we’re going to have a chat bot do all of this with this work for you in advance we’re getting to agents start to panic about are we going to be cutting numbers, or lose my job, we don’t see that really at customers, what we see is the agents have a more fulfilling job because when something actually reaches them, they’ve got more time. And they can go into it into more depth and more detail. They have sort of attacks on the system that’s already identified, where the bot believes the customer needs to be dealt with and what the issues are. It’ll identify vulnerabilities and things such as that. So you’ve got far more meaningful, meaningful conversation. So if you look at what agents were dealing with, when they were dealing with everything, and there was no digital solution on the front end, no chatbot, no AI, they have very short conversations. Now they have much more meaningful long conversations. And when you analyse it, the outcomes are far better. And I don’t just mean better in the levels of collections better in the solution for the customer.

8:31
I mean, it’s interesting, because we’re always, we always try to think in almost like absolute terms, typically. So it’s either we’re going to be completely digital, or we’re going to be you’ve got to have agents sort of doing everything. And really the answer was seems to be sort of this blend in between and it’s maybe a little bit more chaotic than we want these two simple sort of extremes, the book ends, but it’s probably somewhere in between, isn’t it and you sort of it sort of becomes a blend between human and machine to a certain extent. Maybe it is sci fi coming through us. It’s a blending conversation between machine and humans.

9:00
Yeah, I think the AI is very useful for taking the we call it heavy lifting. If you think of what people contact call centres for it. It’s a variety of things, again, keeping it in the financial arena. What’s my balance? When did my last payment go out? When’s my next payment coming out? Haven’t had a statement? When was my last letter, this sort of thing that can be dealt with very simply by Ira? How do I make a payment? How do I do this? How do I do that for the how tos? What if they can all be dealt with by the bot to the point where it actually gets to a level where the boss is right? I’m actually not too sure now, but I believe it’s there. So I’m going to put some tags and triggers on this and I’m going to funnel it to the correct agent team to deal with this customer. Then the age is picking it up at that sort of second stage. All of the simplistic FAQs are out of the way

9:55
obviously a lot has been talked about recently around AI progression with AI as Actually with large language models, I know it’s been around for a while in terms of models and decisioning. And those kind of things. But where do you sort of see? Where do you sort of see it evolving to? Is it just the same technology that just allows us to make more complex routine? What’s your kind of approach to it, or when I think,

10:14
I think there’s sort of AI and machine learning, prospect is quite exciting. There’s a lot of, as you said, a lot of press about at the moment that it could go too far. But that’s all controlled within platforms and algorithms. But machine learning is typically the AI looking at conversations, looking at what the resolutions were, what the patterns were based on, on algorithm analysis, and also on the agent saying, this person came in and said this, and we repeatedly do that, we’re taking that feedback and and saying, Great, now let’s put that into the bot. Because we know, we’ve got evidence that this sort of track of a conversation as needed this, so we can then get the bot to do that and take that away from the agent. But I think the key thing from a customer interacting with AI is never to pretend that the bot, the AI is a human, always to identify yourself as a digital assistant. Because people don’t want to be duped or or fooled. I don’t know if you’ve had these phone calls where it’s recorded message, but it’s trying to be a person talking to you and it’s it just doesn’t work, you may want to put the phone down straightaway. And you lose that engagement if you do that. So be honest say, Look, this is AI as digital assistant. At any time, if you feel like you want to get out of this channel, type agent, and we’ll put you into a live person, that’s the best way to approach

11:39
it, I do get those phone calls. And it’s interesting. So I had one with from my water company because they had issues with a water supply. I didn’t mind it, because it’s just a my answering machine. And it was automated and listened to it and then your supply will be up by eight o’clock or whatever it was. And that was fine. But they didn’t require any kind of interaction. As soon as there’s an interaction, I would have been quite upset with it. So it’s almost like the automation piece I was happy with because it was given me information quickly. Whereas if I need any kind of interaction that I wouldn’t have been happy with, which is I think we you guys clay, which is perfect in the collection spaces, you need to have that interaction, but I think it’s almost it’s similar in terms of automation, isn’t it? So I’m happy for you to be a bot when it’s one time. But then if it’s not, then maybe I want to know whether it is or not.

12:22
Yeah, never pretend it’s something isn’t it is a button, it’s there to give the person using that bot, very rapid responses, little setting cues, when you call another 32, there’s gonna be a 45 minute wait, if you just wanted to know what your balances really, you’re not going to sit in that queue for that. So I use that as a great example. The Bots is great. I’ve taken you through a verification that I know who you are. And we’ve gone through ID and V, I’ve asked you a series of DPA questions, I can give you this information, and you can be on your way. And that’s the advantage of having that, like you say, it’s something that is is useful to you. It gets to a point when you decide as the customer, I want to actually speak to another human. And you need to have the system be able to divert into that team immediately.

13:10
So I want to talk a bit about letters. Actually, I know we chatted a little bit about letters, and just whether the letters finally finally finished. So we were all talking about digital, we’re talking about web chat. We’re talking about even the phone we’re talking about now, do you think let us finish? Where do you think we sit with those?

13:25
I don’t, I don’t think it’s finished. As I said to you before, a lot of digital competence or say digital is the only way again, we say it’s blended letters will appeal to certain demographics, certain age groups, for example, some people don’t actually have access to the internet at various points, the limitations on the letter is once it goes out in the post, you actually don’t know what’s happened to it thereafter. So you don’t know if it was received if it was opened by the right person, if there’s been a DPA breach by the wrong person opening, if it’s been read. With the digital side, obviously, you’ve got all of those markers in your EMI, which is quite useful, but you still got to have letters in your armoury, as we said before, have the ability to call people speak to them on the phone, live agents, live chat, letters going out digital letters, digital journeys, so you send somebody a link out on their phone, and it opens what looks like an app. It’s not an app, because they’re making a connection through to your server, but it gives them that self serve. But yeah, there’s always going to be a place for paper letters. I think we’re certainly in the in the near future, and in the next few years, maybe down the line, and it will change as we progress further.

14:33
So I’m in Messenger I’m getting it’s very much it’s that blend, isn’t it? So it’s actually more complex than it was before but nothing sort of disappeared. It’s around. How do you have the flexibility to be able to do lots of different types of channels to talk with people when they need to or when they need it? Really,

14:48
I think it’s having all bases covered, is very important thing, giving your customer choice when how they they want to contact you. And I think all we’ve seen over the past three years is we have and seeing the depth of any of those channels, we’ve just seen a shift. And there has been a shift to digital, we’re all aware of that. But I don’t think the other channels are dead yet.

15:10
And I suppose with the extra complexity that comes around having multiple channels and many channels, we can also get sort of sidetracked by the loon latest thing that’s coming through. So it might be Tiktok messaging, or it might be Snapchat messaging, whatever it is. So we’ll talk about that. Or it might be AI, how much time do you find the clients? Or do you think clients need to spend on putting in the new data technology versus there actually being value in fixing some of the processes? And I’m sort of saying that with the back of my mind, think about, as you add the extra complexity, it’s often easy to forget things like, I think before we were turning around, we’re talking about return mail, or, you know, not opened SMS is or those kinds of things and where do you think that the focus should be in terms of sort of finding value for people?

15:49
I think there are there are other routes, there’s that there’s a digital routes, but from that sort of initial contact perspective, what you mentioned, SMS 93% of all SMS is are opened, it’s still, if you are contacting somebody on a mobile device, which we all carry, huge percentage of phones. Now, smartphones, SMS is still the universal go to service that that everybody can use. We’ve heard a lot of chatter around RCS, RCS can’t, won’t operate on Apple. I think in the UK, it’s about 55 56% of all phones, smartphones are apple. So you immediately take that out of the mix, then it’s got to be a certain generation of phone and you come down to 25% maximum of phones can actually have an RCS. So whilst there’s a product out, there will be I think it’s 12 or 13 years old, there was yes. And it sort of gets regenerated and talked about as a buzzword. It’s not something that’s universal, if you’re looking to contact the customer, so there is a place for these other things WhatsApp etc.

17:00
Do you think they’ll ever open up iMessage which is really like the competitor to RCS of which WhatsApp is is one of them? You noticed restrictions around WhatsApp, but do you think they’ll ever open up iMessage which then would give particularly a carrier led comms or an addition to it to SMS? Really? If you look at iMessage and RCS?

17:18
Is this a tough question? Really? You’re asking? Well, will Apple go? Chris? I wouldn’t like to imagine

17:26
you don’t have the inside track. You don’t have the inside track into Cupertino or anything like that.

17:31
No, I wish but they’ve resisted the urge to to open their platform to RCS for the last 13 years. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. And really, if you’ve got a product that has got such a high market share in smartphones, would you would you open it to Google? I’m not sure. I wouldn’t if I were Apple being honest.

17:54
I mean, it really does feel like as much as we talk about different contact channels, it’s really the mobile phones have been just like such a game changer. And having everything in this little miss like this super communication device and got apps we talked about app communication, we talk about SMS, we got you can do your websites, you can do email, everything just goes through this one device, really, it really has been. It’s such a game changer. And it’s just accessible all the time. And it’s just it strikes me and we’re but we always talk about channels, but actually, it’s the phone. To a certain extent,

18:23
we spoke before this interview started about electric blinds in your home that will now work off Apple home, or Alexa. And you can have it programmed to, for the blinds to go up and down the lights to turn on. And it’s all operated through phone, your phones and out your wallet. It’s your loyalty cards, it’s your access to calendars. It’s how would we ever get away from them? Now,

18:46
some of the questions we can have now here is like how do we make sure that the will don’t get left behind? So you’re talking about letters early and some people don’t have access to the internet? It’s probably a decreasing proportion of the population. But we do still have to think about that, don’t we?

19:00
Yeah, I think I think generation wise is also something some of the older generation have absolutely embraced technology. I remember an instance when we were very first introducing the digital letter. I last met with my business partner when I said it won’t be taken up by a generation of say, over 60s. And then I walked the same afternoon into the supermarket to get a sandwich. And when I was checking out, there was a couple at the desk with and they were I was suggested in the late 70s, possibly 80s. And part of their shopping was a book of how to get the best out of your iPhone. And they picked up and I realised then that it is pushing the boundaries of generations now as well. And obviously as the years move on to the younger generations coming through, so yeah, it’s here to stay for sure.

19:55
And there used to be a lot of concerns even in the UK around notifications, picking up some privacy and those things. And I’ve heard that in other markets as well, which was some of the concerns I used to hear back in the UK. How did that kind of get resolved here, have you,

20:07
if you look at call call centres that they actually have one of their big issues is the cost of dealing with mail that goes to the wrong address, and infections market that the person you’re sending to, can often be quite transient, you have numerous agenda addresses over a short period of time. So you send a letter out, and let’s say you don’t reach the person, what does the person on the other end do, they might ignore it, the call centre will probably wait 10 days and repeat that letter a couple of times, there’s a significant cost to that. They’ll then if you look at the other scenario, the person who receives it who’s the wrong person might open it and you immediately have a data breach, or they look at the financial information of somebody that they have no right to, they then either look at the call centre number, which could be an inbound payment line. And that will ring through to that and talk to an agent who isn’t really there to deal with wrong addresses. So it ties up that call centre, or they pop it back into the post with not known at this address. And that letter will then typically go back to the company that produced the mail on behalf of our customer, they’ll charge a handling fee, they’ll send it back into my customer who sent out the paper letter, and they have to open it and they have to manually enter it and change the address. And we came up with quite a useful solution for that in the fact that we can trigger a survey via an inbound SMS. So in the address window, the letter says if this is not you, text not me or whatever trigger word they want to use to this number, that person text to that number sends them a message back when they click on a link. And it opens up a survey to say, Who are you what address was it sent to? Do you have a forwarding address for the person we’re looking for? And now you can destroy the letter without reading it. So you’ve got that information coming back in a very cost effective way. And you’ve avoided any form of data breach. So this is where digital can help.

22:03
Yeah, yeah. And when when Where do you think we go next from here in terms of all the progress we’ve had? You talked a bit about how it’s transit transfer. Where’s what’s next? What’s in the next sort of five years, given everything that’s happened over the last five years and the acceleration of everything?

22:18
That’s the toughest question you’ve asked me to take Chris. Not having a crystal ball? The answer is I don’t really know. But I don’t see it going back the other way. I would, in my estimation, I would see us just coming up with more digital solutions. And the traditional solutions. And as the generations move through, the traditional solutions will reduce eventually to where that possibly taken away. How long that will take is, I guess the $64 million question. But I think that’s where it’s got to go. That’s where if you were to look at it now and see where how we’ve moved in the last sort of three to four years. I don’t think you’ll see that returning. Could you see smartphones being taken away, and people losing them? I don’t think so. I think they’re just going to continue to do more and control more of our lives and give us more options to touch base with things through this device. So I think the progression will continue, possibly at a slightly slower rate than it has delayed the past few years. But this definitely gets consider.

23:21
I can’t see myself going back to sending SMS is bad news on the number keypad A, B, C, D, E, F G, so that that those are the things

23:28
we all used to hate the predictive text that that that had but now you just talk to your phone that sends the message.

23:33
Exactly. So we didn’t talk about consumer duty. So consumer duties coming in at the end of July. A large part of that is round evidencing and I suppose I asked you a bit about sort of KPIs. You think and particularly KPIs even in the new digital world? I mean, what do you think a good measures that we need to look at? And are the measures we currently have or the old measures really the best measures? What’s your kind of view on that

23:54
if you look at from a consumer duty and treating TCF treating the customer fairly, that’s in place already, and has been for some time, call centres can only contact customers in a certain frequency of different channels, you can only make X amount of calls over a given period, etc. So those controls are in place. Data protection is obviously at the paramount of everybody’s mind. We ISO 27,001 as our most of our customers, nothing is done digitally until you’ve taken the customer through DPA. Minimum two factor authentication before anything is discussed. Where from there do you go you have those controls in place already? And I’m not too sure how that’s going to progress. And any further really, those measures are already there to make sure you’re treating people correctly.

24:46
And what about image measurements around effectiveness of contact? So we talked a bit about is it engagement rate? Is it looking at outcomes in terms of putting people on payment plans on forbearance plans is speed to resolution as an example versus A contact rate or connect rate, do we need to start thinking about some of those kinds of measures? Definitely, I think first and foremost, besides some of the ones we already got in a different kind of in a different kind of order. First and foremost,

25:09
you can’t, you can’t do anything with a customer unless you can reach them. So engagement is the first challenge to make sure that you can give them away too, and make them feel comfortable in doing what quite a few of our customers use our service to send out little explainer videos first, this is why we’re contacting you. And when you’re talking about the collections, often somebody can assume there’s going to be a rather large man with not very much hair and a baseball bat or over their door on it. And it’s yeah, that couldn’t be further from the truth. And so these explainer videos, give him a comfort that wants to talk to you want to understand your circumstances, your current position, and address that appropriately. And I think the consumer probably never gets the level of contact that we have in this marketplace. And when we teach, when we talk to customers, they genuinely are very protective over the relationship with the customer. And don’t call them debtors, any more local customers, they treat them very well. If they engage with them in any manner they want to cover off. The first question is, can you pay your priority bills? Can you feed yourself? Can you heat yourself? Can you roof over your head? All of that has to be covered. Now let’s look at your finances and see what’s best for you. Where do we take you what route to take? Is it forbearance is a cooling period? Do we come back and visit again, when your circumstances change? Do you make small payments? Do you go into payment? All of that we see is in place already with anybody that we deal with it is responsible collections. I think sometimes the industry isn’t seen that way. But the truth of it is there is enough governance there to ensure that is taking place already.

26:49
It’s been there’s been a massive sea change isn’t there in collections over the last 20 years, let’s say and dole 30, certainly 30 years. And we come across this kind of almost like the stereotype is quite different from the reality, do you think we’ve got a bad PR? Do we need to start thinking about how we sort of, you know, the branding around it because it really is around customer support. And they’re all the conversations that that I’ve ever had with people here. It really is the focus for the vast the vast majority of all the calls?

27:18
Yeah, a lot. A lot of collections is done in a contingent fashion. So the DCA is that we deal with the collection companies that work on behalf of a very big brand. And you can imagine that brands are very protective over that brand and any damage to it that could be caused by a bad relationship. So they’ll have a lot of control over how the collections company can address those customers and how they deal with them. It’s a very protected environment. But yeah, I do think there’s a degree of history where people imagined somebody’s going to turn up at the door, break it down and steal their television and the food from the table and honestly, couldn’t be further from the truth. And that brings you back to it’s that mindset, that makes engagement so difficult. Because people think I don’t want to get into this, because that’s going to be the end game. So I’d rather just not talk to them. And I’d rather avoid them. So all of these sort of methods of engagement, everything we spoke to whether it be paper, letter phone, or anything digital has to be in a sort of, in a warm, comforting manner to say, look, we actually want to understand you first, we want to make sure all your priority bills are paid. We want to understand your circumstances, and we want to work with it. And if you can’t afford to pay this debt, then it will be put on hold, we’re not going to take money that you haven’t got to take money that you need to feed your children. That is the genuine approach of our customers to our clients, I’ll say to their customers, but the perception is often different. And we’ve reviewed, you know, web chats where with customers we’ve gone through to see because you’re always looking at what can we get the bot to do to do more, but you look at some of these chats and they review agent performance. And at the very end, the customer say thank you, I didn’t realise that. I’d actually speak to somebody and understand what I’m saying and understand the circumstances. Yeah, yeah, I really appreciate and I’m glad I did this. I’ll come back to in two, three months when the circumstances have changed. We’ve seen that an awful lot,

29:16
Chris? Yeah. It just feel it’s the perception is very different from the reality. And the reality is actually really trying to help people out. And the more we can do around the PR side of it to help people understand that I think it’ll help and because

29:27
yeah, there’s the question companies are a conduit between this end client and their customer who the man is out to, they sit in the middle and they’ve got to protect both ends of that chain. So we’ve got to make sure that the the customer is, is safe and isn’t doing anything wrong, and they protect the, the brand of their clients so you can imagine the responsibilities rather. Hi,

29:48
Darren, thanks very much for making the time on it’s great to talk about contact and all things digital, so I know you guys are the centre of it. So so really appreciate it. No thank you You