Streamlining Payments with Deep Generative AI Insights

The Challenge

The payments industry is a hyper-competitive space, with companies running on razor-thin margins to attract the volumes they need to stay afloat. Keeping customers requires more than just offering the lowest interest rates in town, though. Consumers also demand the best experience, and a single payment failure means they won’t come back.

One prominent buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) provider recognized this reality and built its reputation on exceptional customer service. They staffed a sizeable contact center equipped to address a wide range of customer issues with the utmost care and efficiency. However, even their well-resourced operation faced significant challenges during peak shopping seasons like Black Friday.

Forecasting a record-breaking influx of shoppers both in-store and online post-Thanksgiving, the company anticipated a surge in customer inquiries that would overwhelm their existing contact center capacity. Doubling their workforce through temporary hires meant recruiting over 2,000 additional personnel – a daunting and potentially insufficient solution.

With Black Friday 2023 looming, the company turned to Level AI, seeking a more sustainable and scalable approach to managing the anticipated customer service surge.

Voice of the Customer Insights

Initially, the company implemented a customer service bot to manage call deflection and alleviate pressure on the contact center. However, over time, the landscape of customer inquiries shifted. As customer needs evolved, the self-service bot's capabilities remained static, leading to a gradual increase in monthly contact center conversations.

Enter Level AI's Voice of the Customer (VoC) insights platform. This innovative solution leverages a comprehensive analysis of past conversations – capturing 100% of the data – to generate, quantify, and categorize customer priorities and concerns. By harnessing these insights, the company gained a deep understanding of the current customer service landscape.

This empowered them to identify specific gaps in the existing self-service bot's functionality. Armed with this knowledge, the company swiftly expanded the bot's capabilities, strategically focusing on addressing the most frequently encountered customer queries. This proactive approach ensured the self-service bot remained relevant and effective, ultimately reducing the burden on the contact center and improving the overall customer experience.

The big day

The transformative power of Level AI's Voice of the Customer (VoC) insights platform was demonstrably evident during the recent Black Friday sales period. Compared to a historical average of a 150% increase in customer call volume during this peak shopping season, the company witnessed a mere 6% rise in customer conversations over the entire seven-day period encompassing both Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This remarkable reduction in call volume can be directly attributed to the enhanced capabilities of the self-service bot, empowered by VoC Insights.

Level AI's sentiment analysis revealed a significant improvement in customer interaction sentiment. This positive shift indicates that the self-service bot was successful in providing relevant context and effectively resolving customer queries. As a direct consequence of VoC insights guiding the optimization of the self-service bot, the company estimates that over 500,000 calls were deflected during the holiday weekend, translating to a cost saving exceeding $2 million.

Prior to the implementation of Level AI's VoC insights, the customer service team faced a significant challenge in managing the surge in call volume during the holiday season. This often resulted in a less-than-ideal customer experience, characterized by agents handling multiple simultaneous calls, interrupted conversations, and extended wait times. However, with the enhanced self-service capabilities facilitated by Level AI, the customer service team was able to transform the customer experience. This included near-instantaneous response times and courteous resolution of customer inquiries, exceeding expectations and ensuring a positive outcome even when payment issues arose.