With Upwire’s Payment Solutions, using a combination of SMS, email and Upwire’s NanoSite™ technology, Thorn Business Finance achieved a 660% increase in customer engagement and over $8mill in incremental revenue.
When COVID hit in 2020, many small businesses were so busy keeping their operations alive they simply weren’t engaging with their lenders on payments or payment options. Quite a challenge for lenders.
For Thorn Business Finance (part of ASX-listed Thorn Group), manual contact centre outreach for payments was expensive – and was only engaging a small fraction of their borrowers. In fact, they were only getting active responses from only 11% of them.
Revenue was at risk, costs were high, and the customer experience wasn’t positive.
Shift to a more convenient channel
Upwire moved Thorn payments outreach to an automated combination of SMS and email communications, requesting a payment response or a contract payment term renegotiation.
Each message was personalised and contained a short link to an Upwire NanoSite. The destination NanoSite was key to the success of the solution, according to Thorn executives: rather than simply demanding payment, we led the customer on a simple journey, with options.
It handed control back to the customer in terms of how and when they engaged – and theoutcome they chose. Leading customers through four engaging, personalised screens on their mobile phone, the NanoSites:
• validated identity
• captured missing customer detail
• allowed selection of a payment plan and acceptance of terms
• confirmed banking information
Exceptional outcomes. Fast.
The Upwire payment solution outreach achieved results far surpassing the more expensive contact centre outreach:
• Fast deployment: one month from project start, to outreach commencement.
• High engagement: immediate rise from 11% to 84% customer engagement; a 660% uplift.
• Amazing results: more than 3,000 customers completed a payment plan agreement in the first 2 days of the program.
• Revenue uplift: the Upwire program generated over $8million in revenue in phase one alone.
These results were commercially transformational for the business; and customers were empowered by the ease of transaction and auto-negotiation.
Ongoing results and success
Automated multichannel outreach with Upwire transformed Thorn’s customer communications. And provided a series of additional, incremental benefits:
• Database enrichment: With reachability a weak link in Thorn’s previous communications, our multi-channel approach had a high rate of connection. And enabled Thorn to fill data gaps, collecting missing mobile numbers or email addresses.
• Customer analytics: The Upwire system delivered a rich set of data on which channel customers responded to best, what times they were most reachable, and what their engagement patterns were. Upwire provided Thorn a view of customers that was previously unavailable.
• Easy changes and iterations: Once Upwire’s solution was in place, our low-code approach and intuitive design tools made it easy for the team at Thorn to make changes (to both content or workflow design) and also launch new programs. Without the need to call on developers.
If you would like to discuss the exceptional outcomes Upwire can deliver across your organisation’s customer lifecycle communications – onboarding, payments or retention – please get in touch at sales@upwire.com. We’d love to chat.
