Case Study IPF Digital
How a post-sales support team increased their productivity by 30% – and achieved it without any new hires
More and more often financial institutions in Poland make use of fintech solutions to maximally increase the quality of their services. You don’t have to explain new, useful technologies to the consumer finance company, hapiloans (Polish: hapipożyczki), a brand of the international group IPF Digital, which is not afraid to experiment or think outside the box to get the best possible results.
Hapiloans’ highest priority are their customers. The employees and managers want the customer to receive the loan they need quickly and effortlessly – after all, this is why the customer applies for it online. This is why hapiloans have gained the customers’ trust, which is reaffirmed by the company’s constant growth.
However, such growth quickly translated into an enormous increase in the amount of loan requests which the call centre workers had to handle in time. Soon it became a serious challenge to handle such a amount of requests with the current number of employees. The team verified requests, talked to customers and made sure that the loan instalments arrived on time. At the same time, though, they also had other tasks to complete: creating certificates, updating statuses, sending loan repayment reminders.
Eventually, the requests would pile up. As employees verified one customer, they would watch their to-do tasks accumulate and more and more customers arrive in the virtual queue. But managers really didn’t want their teams to work overtime to process all the requests and deal with the customer traffic and the resulting bottlenecks. They understood how such a solution would impact their teams’ well-being and satisfaction from work, while the growing exhaustion would only lead to more mistakes.
Another challenge which the managers identified was the tedious and repetitive nature of many tasks which employees had to perform. At the end of the day, every now and then the manager would see the bored expression on the employees’ faces as their tasks often consisted of entering or copying and pasting data. He knew that soon he would have to face high employee turnover in his team if the scope of their duties wouldn’t broaden to more creative and engaging projects. Meanwhile the heap of requests waiting for verification kept growing inexorably…
In a place such as hapiloans where you constantly look for new ways to optimise and simplify processes, it was obvious that one should seek the solution among innovative technologies used in fintech. Managers were searching for an option which would:
- be viable,
- lower the costs,
- not result in layoffs,
- help to handle all the requests without any errors,
- be quick to implement.
Finally they decided that the best solution would be to pass the repetitive work over to robots. However, implementing this technology in-house would require high costs – hiring experts, acquiring licences, preparing the infrastructure – and take several months during which call centre employees would still struggle with dull tasks and the overwhelming number of requests to process.
It turned out, though, that there is another way. Soon digital teammates joined the team. From their very first day at work they knew exactly how to perfectly do their tasks. They brought relief to the call centre workers by taking the tasks that frustrated them and by easing the bottleneck caused by constantly issued requests. Digital teammates now monitor the verification transfers, manage the list of requests, update task statuses, and even send out loan disbursements to customers.
The call centre employees, whose number hasn’t changed since robots joined their ranks, have now more time for customers. Their job has become more interesting and their satisfaction increased. Workers have even better contact with customers – they advise them on products and answer any questions and doubts.
The matter of overtime is also solved – requests are processed on time regardless of their amount, so employees and their managers don’t have to worry about the crucial work-life balance. Moreover, digital teammates also work at night, preparing required documents and data. Due to such workflow everything the call centre employees need to ensure smooth and high-quality customer support is already waiting for them every morning as they arrive at work.
This aspect is also important because IPF Digital operates beyond Poland. While working overnight, digital teammates also support branches in other countries and time zones. For example, robots help employees in Mexico by calculating the credit score.
