Webio
Nominated Award: Best Use of AI in a Consumer/Customer Service Application
Website of Company: www.webio.com
Webio is a provider of Conversational AI Solutions to the Credit and Collections industry in Ireland, the UK, and Europe.
Leading brands like The Very Group, SNAP Finance, and Anglian Water use our conversational platform to orchestrate millions of customer conversations at scale and have convenient and highly personalized conversations.
Founded in 2016, Webio’s platform enables the credit industry to positively and empathetically engage with its in-debt and vulnerable customers. Webio is on a mission to rebalance the Credit, Collections and Payment eco-system by reimaging the way lenders engage and converse with customers.
When customers are engaging with companies over SMS, WhatsApp, Viber, or Webchat, conversational interaction feels more natural, and when correctly integrated with data sources, it helps customers engage on their terms and get things done such as pay a bill, change a payment schedule, or just enquire about their payment options.
In 2021 Webio won Best Application of AI in a Consumer or Customer Service Application. Webio was ranked #2 and #8 in the Deloitte Fast 50 Technology Companies 2021/2022 respectively. At the Credit Awards 2022, Webio won two category awards: Best Technology Provider – Customer Service, and Best Use of Technology in Partnership.
Webio secured $4m Series A funding with financial technology specialist VC Finch Capital in June 2022 and we are now in the process of doubling our headcount.
2022/23 will see Webio announce major new partnerships in Italy and Greece as we roll our solution out internationally.
Reason for Nomination
When customers are interacting with companies over SMS, WhatsApp, Viber, or Webchat, conversational interaction feels more natural, and when integrated with data from other sources, it helps customers get things done.
In customer service, the speed with which you are able to sense and respond to a situation is key to customer satisfaction with outcomes. The faster you respond, the better the outcome. As we enter the end of 2022 many people will find themselves in energy poverty (unable to pay forfuel, light, and heat). Customer service in this difficult environment will become even more challenging. Webio will be helping utility companies identify and respond to the signals that people might need some more help than usual, that they becoming vulnerable. As a utility company, being able to demonstrate that you tracking and responding to such issues, is a mandated activity.
Credit and collections departments deal with highly sensitive information so naturally, Utilities and financial services companies are concerned about where their data goes. Webio has thus built its own proprietary Conversational AI (NLP) Engine to specifically identify the intents and entities associated with credit and collections conversations. This enables Webio to understand what the customer is trying to achieve more effectively than generic solutions.
Because it is combined with the Webio custom dialog manager (bot flow manager), and Webio’s API 2.1 specifically built to reflect the workflows of credit and collections organisations, we help customers get the job done faster and more effectively than other solutions. To repeat: a custom NLP Engine,
working with a custom Dialog Manager, connected to a custom API. They work in concert to get the job done.
Webio also enables each company to spin up an entirely containerised instance of the Webio Conversational Engine so that they can train their own labels, create custom entities, intents, and ultimately generate their own propensities, all within a maximally scalable solution. In short, this brings a privacy-first custom AI solutions within reach of every Debt Collection Agency and Credit Department. This custom assistant architecture ensures that the company’s data is totally secure and that they are training their own AI on their own data.
This scalable custom assistant architecture underpins our Propensity Studio offering where customers can find pre-trained Propensity measures such as Propensity to Pay, Propensity to be Satisfied, and most importantly Propensity to be Vulnerable. Customers in credit conversations say words and phrases which Propensity Studio uses to generate Vulnerability Scores (Propensity to be Vulnerable) under the UK FCA regulation definitions. Companies can choose the various levels of sensitivity they require to optimise their own business goals. In either case, companies using Webio have control over what is labelled, and how the label is presented and acted upon. Webioflow entities can be extracted from a conversation and used by bot automation or represented to human agents as
conversational prompts.
For instance, if a customer has indicated the amount of money they are due to pay, the severity of their emotional state due to personal illness, this message would be automatically labelled as Vulnerable/health, and an agent would click to see more. In the assistant pane, the human agent sees the reading for Vulnerability/Heath, the key phrases and other details from the message from which the agent can then choose to move this person to a vulnerability queue where specially trained agents are ready to deal with it.
As confidence in the solution grows our clients can choose to automate these kinds of interactions so that the message is automatically picked out of the main conversation flow and placed in that vulnerability queue.
Being able to automatically label and track all conversations is a valuable tool. Webio not only helps companies identify these conversations but also helps companies demonstrate how vulnerable people were offered different conversational journeys and conversational outcomes that resulted from these interventions.
As the winter progresses, being able to track how well you are able to sense and respond to customer vulnerabilities will become issue #1 for many companies.
Additional Information:
Customer Case Study (Confidential)
Our client, DCBL specialises in high-volume letter-driven debt recovery and high court enforcement. A core area of the business focuses on sending 800,000+ parking letters on behalf of Private Car Park Operators. This method of customer interaction results in high inbound customer calls querying fines and making payments.
This results in spiking call volumes and long call-waiting times. With call abandonment rates of 65%-70%, means frustrated customers were hanging up. DCBL partnered with Webio to develop a creative solution to address call abandonment rates, improve customer experience, improve customer
wins/payments, and optimise internal performance.
UNIQUE APPROACH TO MARRYING DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT WITH
TRADITIONAL CHANNELS
Crucial to managing high call volumes and abandonment rates was the ability to proactively reengage with customers. Conversational AI chatbots were designed to deploy within minutes of the customer hanging up.
This channel-shift:
· secured a 76% increase in customer wins/payments resulting in February/March being the best ever collections on record!
· gave reassurance to customers that resolving their query was a priority
· opened an immediate line of communication with agents
· allowed agents to handle 15+ conversations simultaneously due to the asynchronous nature of SMS
· delivered a 45% response rate
· increased FCR rates
INBOUND CALL PROCESS TRANSFORMATION
Next was tackling rising inbound calls, call-waiting times, and abandoned calls. Building upon the AI automation, chatbot and channel foundation, a WhatsApp initiative was launched. Given the limited digital data available on debtors (no numbers), letters are the first outreach step. Five trial letter types now include a QR code that customers scan to kick-start a live agent conversation over WhatsApp, eradicating the need for a call. Agents have the ability to manage multiple conversations at once thus
ensuring a resolution that takes place at the customer’s pace. A 26% decrease in calls per month is being achieved, as WhatsApp conversations are replacing them. QR codes are being rolled out to all letter types.
By simply, automating friction points in the customer journey, DCBL is delivering a more efficient call/conversation management process with 89% of interactions handled by automation.
EXTENDING SELF-SERVICE CAPABILITIES WITH IN-MESSAGE PAYMENTS
By extending channels to WhatsApp/SMS and adding chatbot automation we now have the capability to offer a unique 24/7 service. DCBL is now dealing with more debtor queries far more effectively and has seen record-breaking collection rates from this.
Webio project 2021
Nominated Company: Webio
Nominated Award: Intelligent Automation – Best Use of RPA & Cognitive
Everyone has relationships with utility companies, banks, insurance companies etc. And sometimes we forget to pay, miss multiple payments but end up paying, need help or are in trouble. Yet the credit and collections industry treats all of these situations as being the same. Companies know they must change but there’s a problem.
The companies/teams that manage these processes have disparate legacy software, no one central data-spine, and no digital communications capabilities. Webio’s client a large retailer understood the need to move towards conversational interaction with customers over messaging channels but had to overcome crucial legacy issues to get there.
Central to these issues was the access to APIs, access to information transfer outside of an API, and the ability to use cognitive services in legacy communications channels. The central question became “how on earth could we use conversational AI in communications channels if we couldn’t get the right data at the right time?
Fortunately, Webio’s single simplified conversational API allowed them to gather the right data for the right conversation from the right source via file drop, API to an SFTP server, and pure API. RPA providers gather data and pushed it to an SFTP server where a Webio API call picked up the file on a scheduled basis and brought it into the Webio platform for execution. Webio used its conversational middleware to run initial conversational interactions over SMS, but the same API and the same process will also support other messaging and communications channels.
Webio, as a conversational middleware company that specialises in delivering automated, and human-assisted customer service conversations, is specifically designed to address these kinds of credit and collections workflows. Webio AI also understands the language of industry terms and the types of decisions that need to be made in credit and collections contexts. In short, we understand how to make conversations flow. As far as possible the goal here is to make this a fully automated process, delivering a fully automated conversation. It’s been an incredibly successful initiative with measurable benefits in terms of increasing the number of times they successfully connect with customers, especially those that have been previously difficult to engage with.
Better conversational engagement has directly impacted key metrics such as the number of customers engaged, identification and verification processes (ID&V), and other custom processes.
For the end customers, they no longer receive calls about missed or outstanding payments. These calls can cause anxiety. In SMS and messengers, customers have a safe place where they have control over the process, where it’s safe to ask questions. It removes feelings of being put under pressure, of being judged, of having to make promises that they might not be able to keep. It changes the dynamic of interaction. As a process, it’s also completely supported by the companys’ agents, on Webio agent desktops, where agents can see how many conversations are happening, and how the conversational flow is performing.
Reason for Nomination:
Webio is working with leading companies to help identify where their customers are having difficulties, where they are getting frustrated, and where they are becoming vulnerable. We believe that any company can add this digital capability to their service and change credit conversations into highly automated customer service conversations.
• Webio has taken a very practical approach to get AI-driven services into the hands of companies. This means focusing on an existing SMS channel, using minimal conversational AI to start with, but with full end to end automation focus.
• Getting the data is a key part of every cognitive project. This example shows how you can still get some of the benefits of cognitive services “early” by using a combination of RPA and conversational AI in a targeted manner.
• Having built confidence in the ability to automate conversations, Webio now intends to drown the relationship with this client by extending into other channels and into a deeper use of conversational AI.
• This client is particularly careful around their use of data. As part of its overall Conversational AI Strategy, Webio controls all the data around financial conversations from the endpoint in. Webio handles how the conversational structure is defined (Intents), the conversational workflow rules (conditions), and the conversational intelligence with its proprietary software.
• Webioflow NLP is designed for the specific requirements of the credit and collections industry. Understanding the specific terms used, the company’s product names, Webioflow has been built from the ground up to ensure that we recognise entities and intents Accurately.
Webio has had numerous technical challenges to overcome:
• We had to build our own NLP engine so that it could be more deeply embedded into our platform and so that it could be more easily adopted by our users. This is now being evaluated by the client.
• The NLP had to be able to identify multiple intents in the one conversational turn to reduce the number of conversational turns required to achieve a goal.
• The infrastructure had to be developed to support the multiple methods of data importation and this had to be incorporated into the Webio Conversational API.
Finally, let’s look at this from the end customers point of view:
• Customers can self-serve their loans, arrears, and related issues entirely through conversational chat and messaging. They don’t have to jump to FAQs, log into another portal, or jump on a phone call. It is thus far more convenient.
• Customers can engage with the financial services department in an asynchronous conversational manner, thus reducing the level of pressure and stress a customer might feel compared to speaking live with an agent on the phone.
Additional Information:
We built our Conversational AI in a very strategic manner
• First, we built Propensity Studio that delivers predictable conversations, a unique product feature in our industry that differentiates us from the competition.
• We then focused on Propensity to be Vulnerable, a particular type of measure that was not only desired by the target customers, but which falls under a duty of care mandated by a regulator.
• We reused the work undertaken in Propensity Studio to deliver Webioflow, our NLP engine, to re-enforce our position as a secure enterprise-scale vendor for the financial services sector. Again, a key differentiator in our target market.
• We then made both Propensities and our Webioflow available to the rest of the Webio platform such as workflow rules and reporting. This means customers can sort conversations by “propensity”, find out how much money is at risk, or another creative use case.
Webio built our Conversational AI in partnership with our target market
• Rather than build an AI capability in the lab and then launch it, Webio spoke with target customers and released several MVPs to assess the reaction to the offer, the usefulness of the feature and to identify any barriers to adoption.
• This created a new focus on ease of use. For many of our mid-tier customers to use this, it had to be a no-code interface with the minimal technical support required from the customer side. For instance, an embedded NLP solution that did not require new sourcing and sign off and set up work was an outcome of these consultations.
• Working with key clients we developed an “out-of-the-box ready” set of propensities that would be available to all Webio customers. This required working with clients on over 100,000 separate conversations to bring the AI to an acceptable level of accuracy.
Webio has built a scalable data infrastructure to support a global rollout
• During the MVP and trials processes, it became obvious that some changes had to be made to the baseline infrastructure if real-time readings were to be made available in the manner that was envisaged. This has now been put in place.
• Webio can now serve our customers with a Conversational AI-powered solution in the USA, Europe, and the UK, enabling each to remain private, secure, and compliant within their jurisdiction. Building this in from the bottom up will become a key success factor for 2022.
• Webio has already sold this capability to a pan European partner who will embed this into their core offering and enable us to reach over fifty European banking and financial service partners.