Supporting the client’s expansion
Our client is a well-established member-owned financial service organisation, the only one of its kind in Ireland. Our client’s full suite of payment services has enabled its partners to enhance their offerings to their members.
As the client began to grow, they identified that they were in a position to outsource some aspects of their Card Services Helpline. It was determined that support was necessary on a 24x7 basis, as well as in managing the increase in the number of calls to the line. Arema Connect was selected as the Business Process Outsourcer to support the client due to our shared values, as well as service standards, performance results, and people-first approach.
Our Helpline Services for the client
Since 2022, Arema Connect has provided this client with a 24x7 Card Services Helpline. Our team is responsible for managing overflow and out-of-hours (OOH) calls on the client’s behalf. This service ensures that client’s members are supported around the clock and gives their members peace of mind, whether they are on holiday or travelling. Our team works closely with the client’s team to handle a variety of functions including -
- Debit Card activation;
- Updating cardholder information;
- Card Use queries;
- Cancelling Accounts;
- Replacements of damaged cards;
- PIN Related Queries (PIN Changes and Resets, new PINs)
- Management of unauthorised transactions;
- Lost/Stolen cards;
- Deactivation and reactivation of card details provisioned to Apple Pay/ Google Pay and Google Wallet devices as required for fraud detection;
- Management of suspected identity theft and fraud cases.
Managing service quality
The client is committed to continuously driving its customer support to the next level on behalf of their members. Arema Connect plays a vital role in the client achieving this aim by ensuring that Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are consistently met and surpassed, these include -
- 95% of all calls answered;
- 80% of those calls need to be answered in <20 seconds;
- Average Handle Time <5 minutes;
- Abandon Rate <5%.
Every week Arema Connect provides the client with activity reports detailing: total inbound calls; average wait time (AWT); percentage calls answered under 20 seconds; call abandonment rate; total number of unanswered calls.
Our Quality Assurance Manager and Data Analyst are responsible for monitoring performance and productivity on the account, ensuring that the team continuously meets client’s service standards with the aim of enhancing customer experience. Additionally, the client has real-time access to all call volumes and recordings, which offers them full visibility of our team’s performance.
The client also measures success from a quality point of view. Every month the client in-house team conducts quality monitoring on calls handled by our team and reports any areas for improvement to our account management team.
The client proactively gathers feedback from each of its partners. Feedback is collated via quarterly meetings with the various Senior Leadership teams and members nationwide. This feedback is then shared with Arema Connect to drive continuous improvement and efficiency on the account.
Supporting Ad Hoc Projects on Behalf of the client
Outbound campaign to contact members nationwide: In 2023 we supported the client to deliver a large outbound SMS and call campaign. This course of action was required to migrate over 10,000 cardholders to a new card provider. This project meant all such cardholders had to be contacted, and advised they would be receiving a new card via post and that their old card would stop working on a specific date.
As the client’s in-house team was unfamiliar with how to best approach such a large-scale outbound campaign, they relied on our experience and expertise to design and implement a campaign that would allow debit card members to be contacted and updated seamlessly. To meet the project time constraints, Arema Connect assigned a dedicated team of agents to carry out the campaign outbound calls. All the relevant cardholders received an SMS advising that a member of our team would be contacting them from a dedicated number, thus adding a layer of transparency for individuals by ensuring them it was not a scam call. In turn, the answer rate of calls was higher while also offering members peace of mind. The campaign was rolled out over 2 weeks, in which we:
- Sent over 15000 text messages;
- Made over 12000 outbound calls;
This campaign resulted in the client’s members being informed of upcoming service changes promptly, leading to increased customer satisfaction on behalf of the client.
Supporting our client’s Disaster Recovery Plan via a Mass SMS process: As a result of an outage on the client’s Processors database hub, members were impacted when trying to use their debit cards. This sizable outage highlighted the need for the client to further develop its Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP). We partnered with the client to design a well-founded and dependable SMS Disaster Recovery process in order to contact members quickly and efficiently.
Arema Connect currently has SMS templates stored and ready to deploy if the need arises. These SMS templates cover outages on each of the client's systems. Each Friday, the client furnishes us with up-to-date databases from its partners nationwide. All members can be contacted within an hour turnaround time and with a full report available detailing Sent, Delivered and Undelivered statuses. Thankfully to date, this process has not yet been deployed on behalf of the client.
Systems Utilised
Our client uses their own in-house system to manage relationships with members. This system enables agents to fulfil a variety of operations including -
- Searching for a member or Transaction;
- Searching for a Specific Transaction;
- Reviewing Balance/Account Information;
- Retrieving Detailed Transaction/Billing Information;
- Whitelisting cards and transactions to exclude them from real-time fraud monitoring;
- Resetting PIN Tries;
- Changing the Status of Cards;
- Starting Dispute Workflows;
Benefits of the partnership
- Arema Connect has enabled the client to support their customers on a 24x7 basis, leading to increased satisfaction levels on behalf of their members.
- Since teaming up with Arema Connect, the client has gone from servicing 50 financial institutions to 85. The client’s in-house team has grown from a head count of 15 to 30 staff.
- With the support of Arema Connect, the client’s in-house team can allocate additional resources to better understand both cardholders' and financial institutions’ queries and issues and successively identify new features/products to improve their service offering.
Conclusion
Our partnership with the client has proven to be highly successful for both parties. We have further developed our expertise in the financial industry, while the client has gained the ability to support its customers efficiently around the clock. As a rapidly growing company, the client required our experience and ability to scale our support solution quickly in order to grow their business in terms of scope and reputation. Arema Connect is proud to be the voice behind the client’s network.
