Aveni.ai Detects Customer Vulnerability with Its Latest Innovation

Working alongside an equity release firm, the vendor has built an AI model that identifies vulnerable customers

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Aveni.ai Detects Customer Vulnerability with Its Latest Innovation
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Published: January 12, 2022

Charlie Mitchell

After working with Key, the equity release firm, Aveni.ai has developed an AI-powered model to detect customer vulnerability.

Embedding Aveni.ai into the heart of its contact centre technology, Key can now monitor conversations in real-time to identify possible vulnerable customers.

Ordinarily, detecting vulnerability is almost always left to the judgement of an individual advisor. For businesses that operate in highly regulated industries, such as finance, this approach to dealing with vulnerable customers often misses the mark.

After all, the following statistics highlight the alarming percentage of vulnerable customers across the industry:

  • 4 million people have taken payment deferrals on mortgages and other credit products (FCA Perimeter Report, 2020)
  • 22% of people who said they were shielding due to the pandemic have fallen behind on household bills, compared to 6% of people who are not shielding (Citizens Advice)

However, by monitoring 100% of customer conversations, the AI automatically detects signs of vulnerability. These include asking unrelated questions, making irrelevant points, using phrases such as: “My partner used to handle these things,” and much more.

By spotting such troublesome patterns, Key can reimagine its customer vulnerability processes. Harnessing AI, the equity firm will make its vulnerability framework as transparent and robust as possible. In doing so, they strengthen both the customer and advisor experience.

Making this point, Will Hale, CEO of Key, says:

Beyond efficiency, this partnership will allow us to drive greater transparency and oversight, and help us to better identify vulnerable and other high-risk customers, all of which contribute towards ensuring the best possible outcomes for our customers.

Those identified as vulnerable will receive specialist support from Key’s “vulnerability champions”. These contact centre agents receive extensive training, covering a range of vulnerabilities. From age to ill-health (both mental and physical), socio-economic status to illiteracy, these agents understand how to support all types of vulnerable customers.

Aveni.ai will also work with Key to power superior advisor training and oversight processes while bolstering their quality assurance (QA) programme. As a Natural Language Processing (NLP) specialist, the AI provider can uncover a wide range of customer and agent insights. These go beyond customer vulnerability.

By prolonging the partnership, the equity firm will delve deeper into such insights. In doing so, it will improve its approach to assessing data, monitoring performance, training agents, serving customers, and reporting KPIs.

A process of this ilk is critical to the Aveni approach. As Joseph Twigg, CEO of Aveni, says:

Every company is unique, and off-the-shelf speech analytics tools often deliver less than optimal results, so we start by understanding the specific problems our customers are trying to solve.

“It’s great to work with a company like Key that truly cares about its clients and recognises that innovative solutions can help improve customer service and ultimately unlock a wealth of new intelligence and insight,” Twigg concludes.

These new insights, driven by AI-powered analytics tools, enable companies to better structure in-house data and create a clear strategy for identifying vulnerable customers.

Yet, this is only the beginning, as the companies will continue to work together and push boundaries with disruptive NLP innovation.

 

 

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