Webio
Nominated Award: Best Use of Responsible AI & Ethics
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 their 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.
Because we are dealing with highly sensitive credit and collections information Webio has built its own proprietary Conversational (NLP) Engine to specifically identify the intents and entities associated with credit conversations. We also enable 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 labels, and 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 Team. 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 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. Being able to automatically label and track all your conversations is a valuable tool for companies as there are heavy social and financial implications in not having processes in place to identify vulnerable people and in providing them with appropriate information,
advice and support. 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.
Many people find themselves in debt, and in 2022 more and more people will find themselves in debt as things like basic utility bills become increasingly unaffordable. Companies often treat bill payments as hard limits that customers either on time or not on time, that customers either pay or don’t pay, whether that customer can afford it or not. When this approach is taken difficulties arise.
Our data shows that more people pay off more debt if creditors engage empathetically. The most common reaction of people, when faced with a bill that they just can’t afford to pay, is to bury their heads in the sand and disengage. This is not surprising. Conversations about money are difficult to have.
However, that is the worst possible response for that customer, as debt collection processes then escalate, fees and interest rates are applied, and eventually, it ends up as a legal matter. Using Webio conversational interaction, companies can identify vulnerable customers, engage with them by inserting a live human agent into the conversation, and then help that customer identify a path of action that keeps them engaged, keeps them paying in some manner, and keep the whole situation from escalating to the point where the relationship breaks down.
Ethical and Responsible customer interaction may appear as simple as using an open question to see if a customer wants to share more details with you: “Sorry to hear that things are so tight at the moment. Is there something that has caused this to happen”? This gives the customer an opportunity to share if their situation is medical, financial, or personal capability based. Being more Ethical and Responsible is giving a person the opportunity to speak to a trained operative, familiar with the type of problem a customer is having. It also ensures that these conversations remain private and that the information shared is not used in any manner than intended by the customer.
Additional Information:
Propensity Studio uses the power of AI to predict specific business outcomes across all digital collection conversations. With the power to guide each customer conversation through a range of best next steps dynamically selected in real-time as the conversation flows.
Engaging with customers and managing the nuances of each individual customer’s personal circumstances, especially for digital conversations at scale is challenging. Ensuring that the right conversation is being had at the right time in a fair and compliant manner to achieve the desired outcome is not easy.
How it Works
It is designed to optimise customer engagement using AI and automation to better manage all customer conversations, especially the vulnerable ones.
AI getting to the heart of the conversation
Guiding conversations to successful outcomes using intent, sentiment analysis and NLU, our Propensity Studio interprets customers’ language, response behaviours and previous conversational history to determine how best to manage each interaction.
Linking Business Outcomes to Customer Conversations
Working with Webio chatbots or with live agents, Propensity Studio identifies business outcomes with 84.7% accuracy within two/three utterances of the conversation starting by assessing and applying individual scores in real-time and moving the conversation to the next best step.
This scoring mechanism allows efficient, low-cost management of the flow and content of an unlimited volume of conversations. Not all outcomes are the same, even with the same name Promise to Pay is a good example simple to understand but means something different for many businesses, Propensity Studio gives results in defined outcomes, not generic meanings.
Design Conversation Flows with Automation at the Core
Automate customer journeys more and even better than you ever thought possible simply because you know what the likely conversation outcome is going to be. Reduce the number of agent resources needed and only bring in agents when needed or at a certain point in the journey by designing highly personalised conversations that get the balance right between automation and live agent engagement.
Have Propensity Studio assist agents with its traffic light system, identifying the probability of particular business outcomes being achieved. Identifying what the outcomes are, typically within two-three utterances of the conversation starting, will indicate how the conversation should flow. Also, giving agents the ability to update customer statuses with custom tags as the conversation flows.
In essence, every conversation is being managed at the level of the best agents by optimising automated and live-agent performance.
Optimising Engagement to Manage Vulnerability
Predicting customers’ emotional state or their financial well-being was challenging on a voice call and for many was never thought to be possible via a text message. With Propensity Studio this is now done via conversational messaging engagement. AI is designed to work empathetically with the end customer’s best interest in mind
Identify vulnerable customers at any stage of the conversation and route them to skilled agents to continue the conversation as appropriate. With the audit trail features, this approach is iron clad and with Webio’s explainable AI, a deeper level of compliance is achieved.