MRS BPO LLC, a leading provider of services to the accounts receivable management industry, announced that their proprietary conversational IVR tool, Adam, has driven record results in 2020.
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Launched in beta mode in mid-2018, Adam is a virtual agent, conceptualized, designed, and built at MRS BPO, using IBM’s Watson Natural Language Processing software engine. Using NLP and artificial intelligence, Adam is able to converse with customers, offer solutions, take payments and handle a variety of other questions and scenarios that are commonplace in the collection industry – without any human intervention.
In 2019, Adam’s first full year of use, he collected almost $2.8 million dollars, took over 17,000 payments and handled millions of inbound calls that would have required the attention of approximately 50 agents. Continuous improvement and refinement is made regularly and Adam learns as he goes. What takes a highly skilled agent to accomplish in three years or greater, Adam has been able to do in roughly four months.
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2020 has been a remarkable year for Adam as COVID-19 has dramatically changed the contact center and collection industry. Because Adam can handle previously unmanageable call volumes and is deployed 24/7, collection records are being broken. In just the first seven months of 2020, Adam has handled over one million calls, taken over 20,000 payments and collected more than $4.50 million. “That number of calls equates to tens of thousands of payroll hours of agent time. That’s really important because those agents are now freed up to take on other high value functions that satisfy customer needs,” explained Co-CEO Jeff Freeman.
“We have been bullish on the ever expanding capabilities of Adam, and how he helps us in a normal environment is very important. However, as we’ve dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic and adapted to the changing habits of customers and when they choose to contact us, Adam has been a game changer,” said Chief Operating Officer Jim Beck. “Normal call volume doesn’t exist during a pandemic, and having a 24/7 tool like Adam has given us the ability to properly service more customers at a time of great stress and unease.”
At a recent Inside ARM Technology and Strategy Conference, Adam was recognized with a “Tech of the Day” award. MRS’s digital roadmap continues to expand into omnichannel solutions that combine Adam’s capabilities with chat, email, texting and web portal functions. “Our focus over the past five years has been to give customers the ability to communicate with us in the manner, and time of their choosing. Adam is an additional channel for them when they want to work with us,” said Freedman.