Alacriti: Helping Clients Help Those They Serve

“As the effects of the pandemic persist, we continue to search for ways to make life easier for our clients and those they serve. We look forward to doing more as the need arises,” says Alacriti Senior Vice President Stuart Bain. Here, he details how the Alacriti team responded to COVID-19 by not only assisting with PPE donations, but also by providing its clients with resources to help their own customers and members.

The following is an excerpt from What Did You Change?, contributed by Alacriti SVP Stuart Bain.

When the pandemic hit, I am proud to say that the Alacriti team found creative ways to support their communities. For example, employees made masks and donated them to hospitals.

They also donated PPE to domestic hospitals and food packages internationally. However, the biggest change our organization made in response to COVID-19 was providing our clients with the resources to help their customers or members cope with the crisis.

This initiative had three components. The first included waiving the fees for any new client that deployed Alacriti’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, Ella, as a virtual CSR to answer questions and assist in reducing call volume to their call centers. Many businesses and financial institutions were inundated with calls as our physical world came to a halt, and Ella helps provide relief by using AI to answer FAQs while filtering more complex inquiries to live support staff.

The second aspect of our response was the introduction of a rapid deployment option for clients who needed to implement payments quickly.

Additionally, we supported the ability for a consumer to request to skip a payment on a loan. Adding the flexibility to automate this process during the pandemic provided relief to our clients’ operations and support teams, while also delivering peace of mind to their payees.

Lastly, the third component was to give our clients more options for card payment convenience fees. During the pandemic, we provided an option for our clients to turn off the default convenience fee settings, making payments cheaper for their end customers or members.

As the effects of the pandemic persist, we continue to search for ways to make life easier for our clients and those they serve. We look forward to doing more as the need arises.