Success Story
humm group Automates Workflow & Decisioning for Financial Hardships and Enhances Customer Engagement
Business Challenge
humm group is a diversified full-service payments company with leading offerings in buy-now-pay-later, revolving credit, and SME (small and medium enterprise) finance. It facilitates purchases for more than 2.6 million customers in Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland.
Driven by its purpose to “help people buy everything, everywhere, everyday,” humm group gives customers the ability to pay for purchases using buy-now-pay-later (humm and bundll), revolving credit (humm90), and buy-now-pay-later for small and medium enterprises (hummpro). The company helps its commercial customers with a range of options to support them in building their businesses and driving the economy.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and economic hardship relief programs followed, humm group needed to deploy an automated intelligent workflow and decisioning system so its agents weren’t swept up in a tsunami of phone calls.
Solution
Fortunately, humm group was already an enthusiastic user of Katabat, a complete end-to-end omnichannel debt collection platform. From strategy to delivery, Katabat enables a truly customer-centric approach, including customizable messaging, tone and settlement offers, that means delivering the right message through the customers’ preferred channels. So, humm group contacted Katabat Configuration Services to craft a solution — which it needed immediately.
“We needed to implement a user-friendly solution as soon as possible to deal with the influx we could see coming from customers seeking hardship relief because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the related shutdowns,” says Ash Dalalchi, Head of Collections Strategy at humm group. “We were amazed when the Katabat Configuration Services team gave us an extremely efficient and user-friendly solution in a mere two weeks — start to finish.”
Design Strategy
The Katabat Configuration Services team, working with the humm group’s existing Katabat platform, used the product’s robust configuration controls and Strategy Engine to create the custom solution. Basic design elements included:
- User-Friendly Front End for Filling Out Hardship Applications. Humm group has built its business on providing innovative, easy-to-use financial services for its customers. So it was essential that when customers came to the site to fill out an application for hardship relief, they interacted with an interface that was extremely easy to use and inviting. Katabat Configuration Services embodied this user-friendly philosophy as they converted official paper documents into digital forms that walked the user through the process.
- Branding by Product. The user-friendly frontend included customized branding so users would find themselves in the same look and feel environment they were used to seeing when performing other services involving the specific type of financial service they used. For example, each credit card type had its own on-brand logos, colors, and look and feel. This was part of helping humm group customers feel at ease during the tense times evoked by the pandemic, and to remove anxiety from applying for hardship assistance.
- Automated Workflow and Decisioning. Katabat, working closely with humm group, embedded automated workflow and decisioning for application assessment and approval. The work was done using system configuration within Katabat’s Strategy Engine, which combines powerful decision tree and workflow capabilities in one unified platform, making it fast and easy to design unique and interactive customer experiences. Automated decisioning was a mission-critical element. It wasn’t enough to just give users an easy way to fill out the application. The solution also needed to automate financial assessment and application approval decisions — within defined guardrails — to protect humm group agents and credit approvers from being buried in an avalanche of applications. Katabat’s automated decisioning solution meant that more than 95% of applications could be safely approved automatically — while routing exception cases to humm group agents for personal attention.
Results
humm group has experienced numerous benefits since deploying the Katabat solution, including:
Automated Workflow & Decisioning
Enormous Time Savings for Agents
Ease of Use for Customers & Agents
Enhanced Customer Engagement
Flexibility of the Katabat Platform
Seamless Flow of Information
Auditability of All Actions
Forecasting Lower Write-Offs
Automated Workflow & Decisioning
The financial assessment and decisioning workflow of the Katabat solution succeeded in automating the processing and approval of nearly all humm group’s financial hardship applications. “During the COVID-19 pandemic many of our customers experienced difficulty in meeting their financial commitments with us,” Dalalchi says. “Working closely with Katabat, we were able to slash the lead time for financial hardship applications for our customers, from application stage to final approval. Our humm group process improved from the industry standard of 14 days to just 5 minutes. We consider ourselves fortunate to have found such a likeminded partner. Together we are creating a new world of digital finance and customer experience.” “Most customers were immediately approved for loan deferrals within humm pre-configured parameters,” says Marystela Santana, Business Applications Lead | Enterprise IT at humm group. “A small number were deferred to agents for a manual assessment or for a customer call to review and implement new payment plans.”
Automated workflow & decisioning reduced application approval time from 2 weeks to 5 minutes.
Enormous Time Savings for Agents
The automated workflow and decisioning provided an enormous time savings for humm group agents. “We’ve found that our Katabat solution can easily and accurately handle some 95% of our hardship applications automatically,” Dalalchi says. “If we were dealing with 100,000 hardship applications, that means that only about 5,000 would be directed to our call center for agent involvement. 5,000 is doable, but 100,000 isn’t. Katabat saved us from having to manually process and review what would have otherwise been an overwhelming number of applications.”
Ease of Use for Customers and Agents: “Extreme User Friendliness”
The Katabat solution proved to be easy to use for humm group customers and its agents — which proved a good match with the company’s philosophy. “At humm group, we take pride in pioneering a whole new world of consumer finance,” Dalalchi says. “We’re on a mission to revolutionize the way people buy with easy, digital interest free finance designed specifically for today’s consumers. This means that the extreme user friendliness that Katabat brings to both the customer-facing and the back-end agent-facing interfaces fit exactly with how we are redefining how consumers experience the world of finance.” In deploying their automated process for applying for hardship relief, humm group opened up a new — and effective — channel of communication for its customers.
Customers liked being able to apply and get approval without speaking to another human.
“Traditionally in debt collection, it’s focused around one-on-one interaction with another human, and that is not what people want when they go into debt,” Dalalchi says. “Our new communication stream is not only efficient, it is the one that people actually prefer to use. It gives them time to think, the ability to go at their own pace. They don’t feel under pressure or that they are being judged.” The automated workflow also eliminates the time delays of playing phone tag with customers.
“The feedback we’ve seen is that our customers really appreciate our automated workflow and decisioning,” Dalalchi says. “This makes it a double win, because the automation makes life easier at our end as well.”
Flexibility of the Katabat Platform
The flexibility of the Katabat platform impressed humm group, especially because it enabled the rapid launch of the new automated workflow solution. “Katabat has workflow pages, which made it easy to implement the questions and answers and other elements,” Santana says. “And all of this fed into the Katabat Strategy Engine to give us the automated decision making which was so important to our solution. We are seeing other ways in which we can use this same flexibility going onward, beyond COVID.”
"Our customers really appreciate our automated workflow and decisioning. This makes it a double win, because the automation makes life easier at our end as well.”
Ash Dalalchi | Head of Collections Strategy
Seamless Flow of Information
The flexibility of the Katabat platform impressed humm group, especially because it enabled the rapid launch of the new automated workflow solution. “Katabat has workflow pages, which made it easy to implement the questions and answers and other elements,” Santana says. “And all of this fed into the Katabat Strategy Engine to give us the automated decision making which was so important to our solution. We are seeing other ways in which we can use this same flexibility going onward, beyond COVID.”
Tighter Compliance
The automated workflow of their Katabat solution helps humm group ensure it remains in compliance with financial regulations—including new legislation around COVID-19 hardship programs. “We can track every single customer we engage with—whether through our automated system or other channels — using Katabat,” Dalalchi says. “Our system allows us to track each customer and ensure we are following all the requirement that the financial hardship legislation involves. We have documentation showing when we contacted them, which hardship programs were offered, and what actions were taken. This would be difficult to track without our Katabat platform.”
Auditability of All Actions
The auditability built into Katabat is valued by humm group because it enables the organization to demonstrate compliance with CFPB and other regulatory agencies. “An important part of deploying a customer-centric strategy is to ensure tight compliance throughout all customer interactions,” Dalachi says. “With Katabat, if one of our agents inadvertently tried to contact a consumer in a time or manner outside of regulatory guidelines, the agent would be automatically alerted. This helps build strong customer relationships. This same auditability also streamlines our documentation should we ever need to demonstrate our compliance.”
Forecasting Lower Write-Offs
Looking ahead, humm group is forecasting lower write-offs because of the efficiency it has gained from its automated workflows and decisioning solution. “We foresee lower write-offs because through automation we have been able to assess the circumstances for each client and place them on the best treatment plan,” Dalalchi says. “The workflow also helps ensure that customers will be re-engaged at the right time.”
About humm group
humm group specializes in financing bigger ticket purchases with a range of credit card and fixed term installment products that are designed for consumers and SMEs. Its product ecosystem of buy now pay later, credit cards, and leasing products has been designed around the core needs of today’s shoppers, retailers, and small and medium enterprises. It currently operates in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada and the UK.