Oplo, in partnership with Webio, has won the Customer Engagement Solution Award at the 2020 Credit & Collections Technology Awards.

The award recognised the way the partnership between Webio and Oplo made a significant difference to the way customers were able to successfully manage their loan during the pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic presented Oplo with a huge challenge by forcing us to change the way we worked and interact with our customers. We needed a communication channel that worked, and we needed it fast. This channel needed to be swift, concise, and easy to understand with no customer barriers to enable our customers to take a payment holiday where they needed one.

Oplo partnered with Webio after an extensive tendering process. We were not only looking for cutting-edge technology that was agile in its deployment, but also for a partner that understood the consumers’ needs for multiple channel engagement, and speed of delivery and Webio evidenced all of these.

With Webio Oplo was ‘first to market’ with an entirely chatbot driven communication engagement tool that offered the required payment holidays to customers whilst capturing all relevant customer information to validate and ensure the correct customer outcome.

The deployment was lightning fast (a couple of days) and with numerous rounds of friction-free continuous improvement since the original release. The Webio solution is fully configurable allowing non-technical staff design, build each customer conversation flow to whatever level of complexity that is needed.

The results far exceed our expectations:

• Three-times higher response rate over every other channel
• Reduced call waiting times at the height of the pandemic by 85%.
• Reduce the payment holiday process from a 20min agent phone call to 2mins via automated messaging chatbots.
• Enabled our customers to get the help they needed in a timeframe which is best-in-class and has led to a continued engagement strategy with our customers
• No disruption to any part of the business when agents worked remotely, as Webio is cloud-based.

Over the last 10 years Oplo has grown to become one of the UK’s largest providers of consumer credit, serving the hardworking ordinary people of Britain.

We are pleased to report that it has been a landmark year in customer and loan book growth and profits.

At the start of August, we re-branded ourselves as Oplo. We have invested time and effort to create and define a brand that better identifies who we are and what we do.

It is our belief that an individual’s potential is far more important than their past. We’re here for all the people who work hard to make a better life for themselves and their loved ones.

We provide loans that help fulfil life’s opportunities, hence the new name ‘Oplo’! It’s also a nod to our Northern heritage and roots in the town of Blackpool.

Below is a summary of our Annual Report. For further details, view the full Oplo Annual Report 2020.