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As an Australian financial support company, Debtbusters has incorporated Pendula into their workflow since 2017, empowering customers to take control of their financial wellbeing, and engage in helpful and productive conversations covering sensitive subjects of personal loan, debt agreement & consolidation.
“We deal with a lot of interactions which are short and quick transactions through automation, it’s allowed messages to be continually sent without the consultant needing to take a look at the record.”
Wei, co-founder of Debtbusters
Customers don’t necessarily want to disclose financial difficulties with colleagues and friends. “Their partners mostly don’t know. So they can’t talk about it at work, they won’t talk about it on their commute, they are probably not going to talk about it at home ... and so SMS is our primary driver.” says Simon, co-founder of Debtbusters.
Debtbusters understood from the very beginning that this high-touch process needed to be direct, discreet and personalised. Pendula has improved relationships between customers and team members through empowering real conversations and a better experience through automated, configured customer journeys.
The challenge
Previously, initial touch points such as website enquiries led to automatic communications, but this still required full reliance on the team to manually process at touchpoints throughout the journey.
There was a significant dependency on manual entry for communication templates Simon, co-founder of Debtbusters recalls, “Word documents and names got [manually] replaced with actual names ... that sort of stuff. Very old school.”
The automation of the lead journey has resulted in reduced reliance on phone calls and manual tasks for consultants. Tasks such as attaching and submitting of documents, answering ad hoc questions, and providing reminders to customers, where one-to-one phone calls were previously needed are now a one-to-many automated process. This frees up consultants and automates steps throughout the customer journey. This has contributed to a reduction in the time spent on calls for consultants.
The overall experience with the previous platform was disjointed with “incoming and outgoing messages all separated”. Add to this no direct access to their support team, different time zones, slow response times, and the inconvenience of pre-purchasing credits, Debt Busters had become open to alternatives.
Debtbusters needed a digital conversation management platform that provided:
Easy-to-use system to create configurable customer journeys (SMS & email)
'Set and forget' workflow to ensure steps are met with due diligence every time
Integration with their existing customer records (Salesforce)
How Pendula helped
Within a year, DebtBusters was running with Salesforce and Pendula. Outwardly, customers had become active participants in a personalised and discreet conversation with DebtBusters.
Inwardly, workflow has evolved to become coherent and robust:
Automated customer journeys and leads eliminates time-sensitive follow ups
Complete message history view Pendula Console documents the interaction and timing of all messages in one place
Consistent tone of voice and brand image through templates taking away the brain-work out of someone having to even pick from a list of templates.
Business compliance requirements satisfied with no extra effort: Pendula provides a record of messages including the time sent, and full detail per customer, meeting spontaneous and rigorous auditing procedures.
Improved quality of staff and their experience “Having easy systems to use and makes it worth it” — their roles no longer includes monotonous cutting and pasting.
Pendula is seamlessly integrated into Debtbuster’s customer communications. *Further conversations can be held between debt manager and customer on the Pendula Console.
Overall results
Since running on Pendula, DebtBusters has been able to improve customer relationships with less effort.
As a results, they've experienced:
11 automated sales processes allowing less reliance on consultants' time as an a one-on-one resource
Reduced call-time length Consultants have experienced a drop in call-time by 29.5% inbound and 20.3% outbound
37.2% reduction in inbound call volumes
Now there’s less copying and pasting, and more real conversations with Pendula.
It is more than just a dollar discussion, that is, how cheap we can get this for? It’s more about a relationship with us — how well we are serviced and supported, and how genuine Pendula is.
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