AI Phone Agents for Financial Services
Introduction
The mortgages and personal lending industries have always been highly dependent on phones. Call centers, automated SMS messaging, and armies of business development representatives have been the industry standard for years..
While clearly effective (despite leaps in online technology, most are still handling inquiries about products like mortgages over the phone), at Bland, we believe there's a better way.
Artificial Intelligence powered phone agents are the future and present for the loan processing and lending industries. Some key benefits:
- Slashed costs of call centers and entry level business development representatives
- Improved quality of calls, lead qualification and customer support
- Unified branding and messaging across all prospective customers and active customers
- Infinite scalability, and zero latency call times
In this article we'll explore some of the biggest challenges facing the lending and consumer financial service industries when it comes to support and sales. We'll then discuss the benefits of AI powered phone agents and how or if you should be considering implementing them in your own sales and support departments.
AI Phone Agents: A Game-Changer for Lead Management
AI Phone agents have several benefits that are applicable to every sector of financial services:
24/7 availability for immediate response
A cheaper and more effective call center can be built to handle all incoming and outgoing calls.
Scalability during high-volume periods
Handle an limitless amount of concurrent callers without needing to hire more people. AI Phone agent infrastructure scales up and down with the number of callers. No more idle capacity.
Ability to integrate into existing CRMs and systems
AI phone agents are smart enough to be able to talk to any accessible outside application or data source. Whether that's booking appointments into a calendar, updating a CRM or customer support ticket, or redirecting calls intelligently to senior sales people.
Consistent messaging and branding across all interactions
Training call center operators is often a time consuming process and produces inconsistent results when it comes to your branding and messaging with customers or prospective customers. The way AI phone agents are designed ensures that their tone and messaging are dictated from the top down, with no room for misinterpretation or variation across calls.
Regulations and company policies move quickly in financial services. AI Phone agents can be set up to instantly receive your policy and information updates, applying the new processes in all of their calls from the start. This eviscerates training/feedback loops that are typical of entry level human call operator environments.
Ability to qualify leads before human intervention
Maximizing the time of your top sales personnel is essential to growing profitable departments and organizations. AI phone agents can handle the initial qualification of your prospects and direct them to more experienced sales staff when the time is right.
Applications in Mortgage Industry
The mortgage industry is one of the most competitive landscapes in the consumer financial services industry. Leads are often costly, and have infinite choice when it comes to companies and mortgage products available. Oftentimes, the company that makes contact first (and has an efficient mortgage process) will win the business. Beyond the initial sale, support and follow-up are crucial to maintaining a customer.
The below challenges are all addressable by Bland's AI Phone agents. While we provide an overview of the functionality here, you really need to see our agents in action for yourself to grasp their true capabilities.
Initial loan inquiries and pre-qualifications
One of the most significant factors in highly competitive industries is the amount of time taken to speak with a prospective customer after they inquire. Large institutions employ vast call centers of entry level salespeople dedicated to the task of calling and connecting with a prospect as immediately as possible.
With AI phone agents this entire infrastructure becomes obsolete. AI agents (when built properly) are now capable of speaking to a prospect instantly after receiving their contact information. Agents can be taught through scripting and access to sales materials how to qualify prospects and conduct the initial calls.
Document collection and verification processes
In mortgages a large amount of personal information is required to collect from every customer. Oftentimes the sheer amount of paperwork can derail the lending process. AI phone agents are patient, persistent, and can be programmed never to miss collecting a specific set of information from a call.
Status updates on loan applications
A large part of customer support for mortgage companies happens after the application. Status updates and follow-up requests for documentation are the expectation for customers and need to be managed with ease. With virtually endless options, customers are highly sensitive to poor support treatment or latency in responses to their questions.
Refinancing opportunities and outreach
Refinancing is a great way to grow revenues and provide previous mortgage customers with a strategic opportunity to lower their rates and monthly payments. Many customers would entertain the idea of refinancing if they were
Challenges With AI Phone Agents
No solution is complete without potential challenges. AI phone agents are no different. Here are a few challenges for consideration when implementing an agent system in the financial industry.
Sales Tactic Regulations
In the US and many other countries there are strict rules about how financial products are presented to and sold by the consumers. Any phone agent designed must be well versed in the regulations and how they can present information (or not present it) regarding things like interest rates and payment amounts.
Personal Data and Storage
Consumer data laws are increasing in their standards year after year. When designing AI phone agents it's essential that all data collection regulations are adhered to. While encryption and storage practices are standard, there are additional steps to ensure that your AI agents do not request information they aren't supposed to from callers.
First Steps Implementing AI Phone Agents in Financial Services
The mortgage and financial services industry are complex and contain a lot of operational moving parts. Massive profits will be awarded to the firms that can leverage exponential technology like AI phone agents first. Reach out to the Bland team today and speak to one of our team members about your company and how we can build out your use case.
