Jun 2020 | Credit Decisions
By Posted by Experian

PowerCurve Customer Assist is here

Experian’s PowerCurve platform has been intelligently designed to help you to make better customer decisions even when operating in a dynamic business environment – such as what we see today. As a unified, modular platform for strategy design and execution, it can significantly improve your credit risk decisioning. But, in today’s unprecedented environment – there is a growing need for more specific, responsive tools.

Investing in innovation is a longstanding objective of ours, and during the current pandemic – we have accelerated this even more through developing capabilities that help solve the unique issues created by the crisis that we are experiencing at present

One of the latest additions to our portfolio is the development of our PowerCurve decisioning suite with the addition of PowerCurve Customer Assist. The service has been designed specifically to help you handle surges in customer demand for hardship assistance, as well as prepare, and respond, to further unpredictable scenarios, as the crisis continues.


Traditional tools may not be compatible today

Undoubtedly, what we face as a global nation is nothing like what we have experienced before. Scenarios are not tested against the breadth of economic impact we face now. For businesses striving to battle the wave of constant change; processes, resource and strategies are being put under extreme pressure – leading to cascading workloads and costs. And these challenges are only growing as we transition through the phases of pandemic shock, to economic shock.

Our economic forecasts suggest that firms will soon be faced with an even greater surge in demand for support. So, while resource is already restrained preparing your people, systems and processes for a further surge of people needing help is crucial now. See the diagram for an illustrative example of this.

First, what is PowerCurve Customer Assist?

PowerCurve Customer Assist combines data, analytics and software to help you manage unexpected increases in demand for customer financial assistance. Our market leading decisioning and workflow capabilities, combined with digital channels, replaces the need for 1-to-1 human interactions, offering your customers a positive customer experience when requesting forbearance or hardship options.


Second, what makes it so good?

There are many reasons why PowerCurve Customer Assist offers new value, but below we cover some of the key benefits which are being seen, and used, by firms globally.

It can help you be efficient, but effective

PowerCurve Customer Assist automates the application and assessment process while ensuring compliance, governance and customer experience. Monitoring and reporting are also included so that you can track the number of applications as well as ongoing hardship arrangements.

Its self-serving

Apart from fully automated interactive communication via SMS, voice and email, PowerCurve Customer Assist also offers self-serve options such as a web portal and AIVA (AIVA is our artificially intelligent virtual assistant). Meaning you can reap the rewards of providing a great customer experience by giving your customers a choice to contact you digitally via a channel of their preference and at a time of their choice.

It can help you onboard, triage and treat customers who are experiencing hardship.

There will be instances where customers may require assistance with their hardship application – and by nature of this emotive need, some won’t want to speak direct. Likewise, with the volumes of people now financially vulnerable – having people to process applications is simply not viable.

With PowerCurve Customer Assist, you can remove manpower, but retain the effective and sensitive communications needed in times like these. Customers can interact with the AI Virtual Assistant which contains the latest in natural language processing and is integrated in real-time with PowerCurve Collections to provide fast decisions on their application.


Cloud-built means agile, fast-deployment

PowerCurve Customer Assist is built on the Experian cloud deployment platform, which means fast deployment and go live for you as well as ongoing updates and maintenance of the platform managed by Experian, on your behalf.

An additional feature which makes is fast is the decisioning layer, which features automated communications. Packaged as a pre-integrated capability, it comes pre-built with hardship workflows requiring minimal configuration changes. What’s unique about PowerCurve Customer Assist is that it is more than a technology. It features a pre-integrated a decisioning engine with multiple automated digital comms channels and self-serve options.


Is PowerCurve Customer Assist right for you?

Making the right choices, fast, is a complex ask. But if your organisation is:

  • Managing high volumes of forbearance and hardship requests as a result of unexpected spikes in demand
  • Processing high proportions of requests manually and looking to introduce automation
  • Wanting to reduce TCO of existing IT estate and become more efficient.
  • Looking for audit capabilities where they are subject to regulatory controls and require audit trails
  • Wanting to reduce costs for managing unpredictable surge in demand?

Then our PowerCurve Customer Assist capability is perfect for you.

As a final concluding note, what are the key differentiators of the capability?

  • The service provides options to combine Experian data (Delphi for Customer Management and Bureau Insights) and/or our Affordability Passport which supports a speedy, efficient open banking based affordability assessment.
  • You can be assured it always up to date. It automatically updates back to your host system, ensuring a single and up-to-date customer view is maintained always
  • We can reduce your costs in managing customer demand considerably – evidence in testing shows you can increase efficiency by ten-fold.
  • The flexibility by design gives you the ability to update workflows with new or modified offers, enabling you to quickly respond to changing regulatory guidance or market needs