Hoist Finance Case Study

The Organization 

Hoist Finance is a debt restructuring partner to international banks and financial institutions, specialized in handling non-performing loans and supporting individuals in becoming debt-free. After purchasing non-performing loans from banks, Hoist contacts the customers to engage in an open dialog to understand the customers’ situation and work with each customer to create a reasonable, long- term installment plan. Hoist Finance purchases and manages non-performing loans in 10 countries across Europe. 

Motivation for Change 

Hoist began in Poland in 2014. Its Polish contact center, which employs approximately 45 agents, still had manual dialing in place which meant that busy signals, voicemail, and no-answers curbed the agents’ talk time. This frustrated the agents and negatively impacted their productivity. Therefore, the most immediate need to impact on performance was to improve efficiency by automating the outbound dialing process. However, this was just the starting point. On a larger scale, Hoist is planning a modernization initiative covering all contact center capabilities as well as further regions. 

Desired Solution 

Hoist was looking for a solution to increase the outbound penetration rate and outbound efficiency to increase the talk time and successfully engage with an increasing number of customers without increasing the number of agents. On a broader level, Hoist wanted to set up a future- proof contact center infrastructure that provided a modern, user-friendly, and more productive work environment for agents and enabled customer- centric omni-channel inbound and outbound communications and digital self-services. 

Additional key issues were flexibility and scalability – Hoist Finance was looking for a highly flexible, scalable solution which would also allow to temporarily add outsourced partners to work on the company’s system to cover peaks, e.g. due to further portfolio acquisition. Therefore, cloud was the delivery model of choice together with a subscription-based pricing model. 

Why Alvaria 

Hoist Finance had already successfully deployed the full range of Alvaria solutions at its locations in the UK, Germany and France for several years and was therefore keen on using Alvaria technology at its expanding site in Poland, with Spain and Italy to follow. Whereas previous implementations were deployed on premise, Hoist chose to move to the cloud and to use Alvaria Cloud for its new deployments. Alvaria Cloud is a cloud-based contact center software which supplies a complete set of customer service capabilities including native interaction management, workforce optimization, IVR and digital self-service. 

The Results 

The dialer project in Poland started in early 2018 and was completed within 4.5 months, instead of the forecasted 6 months. This included all configurations, coaching, training, and complete handover. The automatic dialer detects busy signals, voicemail and no-answers with configurable reattempt and escalation rules, thus increasing agent productivity. Due to its user-friendly design, the solution has led to higher agent motivation and satisfaction. The new web interface provides the agents with a far more intuitive and engaging agent experience, which allows for faster and more informed decisions when engaging with the customers. The gain in efficiency and productivity is reflected in the outbound penetration numbers and increased productive talk time for the agents. Operational effectiveness has improved significantly: the dialer has strongly impacted the outbound KPIs. The number of outbound calls has increased by 45% with the attempt/agent rate growing 5.5 times. Thanks to automated recognition of voicemail and busy lines the percentage of calls handled has also increased to a contact rate between 5-10%. Thus, the agents spend more time talking to customers; talk time is up to 40-70% (from 25-37%). With the increase of outbound activity, the volume of inbound calls handled over Alvaria Cloud has also increased significantly by approximately 25%. Incoming calls have been better prioritized over outbound traffic, so that abandonment figures remained the same despite increased volume of inbound calls. 

In terms of business success, the promise of payment is key and this metric has grown tremendously: comparison of the number of promises of payment for the pre-implementation and post-implementation of the dialer, based on agents/day ratio, shows an over 2.5-fold rise of payment promises. 

Having licensed the comprehensive Alvaria Cloud Enterprise package for its Polish operation, Hoist will pursue a step-by-step implementation of its capabilities. The all-in-one out-of-the-box approach of Alvaria Cloud ensures that time and efforts of the internal IT resources are kept at a minimum. Thus, Hoist can focus on its business while taking advantage of state-of-the-art customer engagement capabilities over a platform that also encompasses functionalities such as workforce optimization as well as shared, real-time, and historical reporting, all combined with a common user interface. 

On their journey with Alvaria Cloud, Hoist expects to continue rolling out inbound call handling and the outbound dialer into its Spanish, Italian and German operations, to include digital self-service and cross- European, multi-site usage of these tools.