How does a voicebot called Patrycja send automated payment reminders at Leroy Merlin?
Reminding about overdue payments is a nightmare for many accounting departments. How can you successfully reach the majority of your customers and talk to them about the delays? How to effectively recover debts? The answer may be to automate this process with a payment reminder voicebot . Check out the story of our client who implemented such a process in their company.
Client
Leroy Merlin is a French-based retailer offering home and garden equipment, operating in Europe, Asia, South America and Africa.
What was the client’s problem?
The client was looking for a tool to optimize the work of the accounting department because it took too much time to remind contractors about unpaid invoices. Therefore, they wanted to effectively automate this process.
Why did the client decide to use a voicebot?
A voicebot provides efficient automation of routine tasks and can handle simple customer communications equally effectively as an employee. Because the client was looking for an automation tool that would remind contractors about overdue payments, they decided to try implementing a voicebot.
What solution did we propose and how was it implemented?
Leroy Merlin was looking for an uncomplicated solution to start with, so we created a relatively simple voicebot named Patrycja, whose task was to call selected contractors with payment reminders. This success story proves that simple solutions can lead to significant changes.
How it’s working:
- The voicebot calls selected contractors every week regarding overdue payments.
- Patrycja calls once and then again those people who did not answer for the first time, which allows to limit the time spent on contacting these contractors.
- The voicebot not only provides simple information – it also makes sure that the message is understandable. If the recipient has additional questions or concerns, they can tell and Patrycja will understand them, record them and inform the contractor what to do next.
- If someone cannot be contacted, the voicebot sends a text message with the payment information – this way, even people who do not answer receive a notification.
What would take an employee at least several hours, our intelligent voicebot does in just a few minutes, saving the customer time and money. Moreover, a voicebot is very well trained to understand people during natural conversations, thanks to which it ensures positive experiences for contractors.
What was the result of the project?
Our voicebot Patrycja increased the probability of receiving timely payments from the contractors. It also helped to free up employees’ time, which they could spend on more complex tasks, thus increasing the team’s overall productivity.
So let’s look at the numbers behind this challenge.
Within 11 months Patrycja carried out 49 telephone campaigns addressed to contractors with overdue payments – 2434 contacts.
About 44%, or 1,070 contacts, answered the phone on the first call attempt, which indicated high initial activity and reactivity of customers.
On the second connection attempt, an additional 440 contacts were reached, which was approximately 18% of the total number.
For those customers who did not respond to call attempts, SMS messages were sent, the total number of which was 912 – diversification of channels enabled us to effectively contact hard-to-reach customers.
The client was very satisfied with this solution:
I can definitely confirm that we are pleased with Patrycja’s results. First, it takes a lot of the burden off the shoulders of our employees who previously performed these tasks. Secondly, we hear from our customers about their positive experiences with the voicebot
– says Anna Uklańska, Senior Process and Automation Manager at Leroy Merlin.