All Oplo employees offered free home chargers when switching to an electric vehicle

Leading UK consumer lender Oplo announces its latest initiative to protect our planet and radically accelerate the reduction of carbon emissions by offering all of its 230 staff a free home charging kit if they choose to switch to an electric vehicle (EV).

In addition, Oplo has teamed up with Octopus Electric Vehicles to offer free and impartial advice to Oplo employees who are thinking about switching to an EV but who would like the opportunity to ask detailed questions about making the switch.

Oplo’s headquarters at Sir Frank Whittle Way in Blackpool already have EV charging units on site for all employees needing to charge their vehicle whilst in the office.

Oplo has previously announced its intention to become a carbon neutral business by the end of this year and this latest initiative follows hot on the heels of its tree planting schemes in Scotland and Blackpool.

Commenting on the initiative, Steve McNicholas, Chief People Officer at Oplo, said:

“Transport accounts for one-third of all carbon emissions in the UK and presents both a huge challenge yet huge opportunity for businesses to powerfully play their part in helping to reduce emissions.  Oplo is intensely focused on creating positive social impact for customers, our people and our community and we want to extend this impact to the planet.

“We are delighted to offer this benefit to our hard-working employees and expect strong interest and take-up of the initiative.”

Fiona Howarth, CEO, Octopus Electric Vehicles said:

“We are thrilled to see Oplo at the forefront of this green revolution by offering our service to their employees, helping them switch to electric and lead more sustainable lifestyles.”

Ends

Media enquiries:

corporateaffairs@myoplo.co.uk

About Oplo:

• Oplo is one of the UK’s leading providers of consumer credit, offering personal loans, home loans and car finance to the emerging “new mainstream” market of consumers seeking credit.

• Oplo makes it easier for people to access fair, expert lending with excellent personalised customer service powered by modern, innovative technology.

• Oplo has over £300m assets under management and is well on track to become the largest direct-to-consumer lender of its type in the UK.

myoplo.co.uk

Octopus Electric Vehicles

Octopus Electric Vehicles (Octopus EV) was launched in 2018 to make it easy for businesses and individuals to make the switch to electric driving.

Offering an all-in-one service, Octopus EV’s experts help drivers to select the right car, get a charge point installed and access green electricity tariffs designed especially for EV drivers. The company’s Electric Dreams service is a salary sacrifice scheme, unlocking significant savings for businesses and employees, making it even more attractive to go electric.

Drivers typically save between 30-40% on monthly leasing payments, up to 60% in some cases. The scheme is a zero-cost and low risk perk to employers, and offers a highly visible commitment to employees, local air pollution and the planet.

Octopus Electric Vehicles is part of Octopus Energy Group – an energy tech company launched in 2016 and now valued at over $2 billion, with a vision of using technology to make the green energy revolution affordable whilst transforming customer experiences.

More information can be found at www.octopusev.com

Oplo were proud to be the winners of the Collections Award at this year’s virtual awards ceremony.  The award recognises the way we developed a solution to help our customers navigate the financial challenges they faced during the Covid-19 pandemic.

We recognised that the pandemic was a very difficult time for many of our customers and  that we needed to react quickly to engage with our customers to find out what support they needed during this time.   As customers became concerned about their ability to meet their monthly payments and wished to request payment holidays, our call volumes soared and call waiting times rose.  We needed a solution to ensure we could communicate with our customers efficiently.

The solution

Oplo already had already partnered with Webio to provide a conversational messaging channel to complement our other customer channels.  This enabled us to swiftly create an automated chatbot to ascertain the degree to which customers were impacted during the Covid 19 crisis. By automating conversations, customers had the ability to agree a payment holiday or revise repayment amounts all without the need to talk to an agent. In the cases where an agent was needed, the customer was seamlessly transferred to a live agent.

A crucial part of this strategy was the ability to prioritise those who were likely to need our help the most by utilising Credit Reference Agency Income Shock batch data on our entire database to understand which of our customers were most impacted financially by the pandemic. This led to us identifying priority cases quicker and gave us the ability to give those customers an even more enhanced journey

Keeping in touch

Maintaining positive relationships, reassuring customers, and showing them that we really care during this difficult period was important. The initial contact with customers was just the start of the process as we understood that customers’ circumstances change and we need to be flexible. ‘Keep in Touch’ bots reached out to customers to check in on how they were doing and to get an update on any changing situations and make changes to payment where necessary.

We also made in excess of 7,000 ‘Keeping In Touch’ calls to customers directly in order to reassure them that we were here to help and the options that were available to them should the need arise.

The results

We were able to reduce our call waiting times at the height of the pandemic from the end of March by 85% and the payment holiday process that took upwards of 20 minutes over the phone reduced to ~2 minutes via the automated chatbot service. This 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 which is now seeing a response rate 3 times greater than any other channel.

Oplo scoops a handful of Silver and Gold Awards for Customer Service

In our first year of trading as Oplo, we wanted to find out if we were fulfilling our ambition to give customers a really great experience each and every time they interact with us, and also to discover ways in which we can continue to improve our customer service.  We enlisted the help of Investors in Customers (IIC), a specialist customer experience agency, to investigate and analyse how we were doing.

On our behalf, IIC questioned a sample of one thousand people around the following areas:  Understanding Customer Needs, Meeting Customer Needs, Delighting Customers and Engendering Loyalty.  The sample included Oplo customers and Oplo people – helping us to gauge if what we at Oplo believe we are delivering matches up with what customers are receiving.

We were really pleased with what we found out – we’ve been confirmed as doing really, really well.  We were credited a glittering array of Gold and Silver awards which shows us we are on the right track with our approach.  Overall in IIC’s accreditation, we were awarded Silver – narrowly missing the Gold standard by less than one percentage point (0.33%).  So we still have room from improvement.  And improve we will.  But this is still a phenomenal achievement from each of the 230 Oplo people who look after our customers day in, day out – particularly through an unprecedented challenging environment such as Covid.

Importantly, the assessment identifies areas for improvement and all of us are very much in action on this.

Trust and Delight

We all know that trust is hard to earn but of paramount importance for customers when choosing a financial services provider.  This is why we were so pleased that customers ranked us Gold standard in the trust category (“I trust the company’s employees to behave with fairness, integrity and honesty.”)  This is praise indeed from our customers and we know it’s not granted lightly.

Customers questioned also ranked Delight as Gold standard, with customers saying:

Committed to Putting Customers First

Tony Barritt, Managing Director of Investors in Customers, said:

“Oplo has done incredibly well in their first Investor in Customers assessment. In a challenging market they have demonstrated a commitment to treating customers fairly. Whilst the results show there is still some work to be done before they reach Gold the employees and senior managers understand the challenges they face and are committed to putting their customers first.”