Petal is championing a mission to bring financial access and opportunity to all people
Petal isn't your standard high growth disruptive FinTech company - they are an organization that is championing a mission to bring financial access and innovation to everyone. Their goal is to make credit honest, simple, and accessible and with their tech-enabled approach they're providing financial opportunities to people who previously were underbanked and oftentimes overlooked and forgotten by the legacy credit system. "Our whole ethos is to cater to and provide financial access to people who don't have an established credit background" says Nolan Parker, CX Operations at Petal. "We determine creditworthiness with what we call a Cash Score which is essentially an aggregation of data points based on income, savings, and spending that traditional banks often overlook."
Lang's rapid time to value was critical for Petal's success
Petal has been growing at a substantial rate over the past three years and recently saw their business accelerate due to the COVID-19 pandemic when many people either lost jobs or had their hours cut back; this threw traditional credit scoring models off and further validated Petal's underwriting approach on prospective cash flow rather than retrospective history. With customer experience being a central part of their differentiation strategy Petal has prioritized scaling their support team through people, process, and automation. "We're experiencing a strong reception from our market and are undergoing a period of hyper-growth and are onboarding thousands of new customers each month" said Parker.
Petal has been able to gain significant efficiency with its CX process through ticket deflection and tagging automation. Lang's rapid implementation and high accuracy were major differentiators in Petal's evaluation process and given Petal's rapid growth the team needed a solution that was live and accurate as fast as possible; it took five business days to go from kick off to first auto reply set. "Lang has been amazing so far and has driven a lot of value in just a short amount of time. Lang's automation functionality has helped reduce our overall support volume by 26% in less than two months, more than exceeding our initial goal of 20%. This has allowed us to prioritize and give extra care to specific issues and interactions that need an additional layer of attention while we automated the simpler one-touch issues", said Parker.
Lang helped Petal reduce agent burnout and opened up additional bandwidth to focus on complex issues
Even though Petal's support agents don't directly interact with the Lang.ai platform, Parker notes that "they are blown away" by the impact it has had on their day to day. Automated responses, tagging, and routing have helped lower the administrative burden on agents and empowered them to focus more on addressing their customer needs. "It allows us to have a greater bandwidth to look at other items and avoid burnout from repetitive one touch issues" said Parker. Lang's reporting and dashboard functionality has also helped Parker and his team improve agent coaching and feedback since they're now able to track customer behavior and trends in real time. "We're very intentional about how we communicate with our customers and try to simplify credit to terms that are understandable to the general public. Lang has been a great tool for empowering our agents to improve their level of service to our customers" said Parker.
Lang is a critical piece of Petal's long term CX strategy
While Petal continues to see significant value from Lang, they're just getting started with their overall automation strategy. Parker said that they're working on automating additional one-touch issues and plan to apply Lang to customer feedback to identify positive and negative intent as well. The team is clear that Lang is a critical piece of the Petal CX technology stack and the automations and insights generated have driven substantial value and time savings to their support teams, "we see Lang as a long term piece of our strategy and are looking forward to automating additional one touch issues, this is critical for us in cutting out the white noise and empowering our agents to focus on the complex customer issues" said Parker. "Longer term, I see a lot of potential with this platform and plan to use Lang's insights capabilities to bring additional teams closer to the CX process."
