COVID-19 Part 2: Your post-pandemic servicing operation
How to Prepare Your Servicing Operation for a Post-Pandemic World
The dual public health and financial crises set off by COVID-19 has created unforeseen challenges for both borrowers and lenders. In a previous post, we highlighted how Peach’s modern loan servicing platform can provide flexible payment plans and loan modification options to borrowers in times of emergency. In this post, we’ll address the challenges lenders face in converting servicing call centers to remote-work operations—and how Peach’s software solutions can make this transition easy.
The Challenges of Remote Work
The recent COVID-19 outbreak has transformed call centers into potential transmission zones, creating health risks for workers. Regardless of whether states allow call centers to remain open, we believe all lenders need to be able to quickly shift servicing operations to remote work where legally possible to protect the health and safety of their employees—and to ensure business continuity.
However, this shift to remote work creates challenges that span across operations, technology, privacy, data security and compliance. Agents need remote access to servicing systems and tools to interact with borrowers while still protecting borrowers’ data in a home environment. Supervisors need to maintain the ability to audit and monitor agent performance for quality. Back office personnel need escalation tools, audit trails, and controls to ensure compliance.
Peach’s modern loan management and servicing platform addresses these challenges and gives lenders a push-button option to enable call center agents to work from home.
How Peach Enables Remote Work
Peach’s servicing platform is a scalable cloud-hosted solution (built on Google Cloud). That means anyone with internet access can be granted access to the system, including those with VoIP connections (without the need for VPN interference). Call center agents working remotely just need to connect an employer-provided computer to the internet and log in to Peach. The Peach application runs in the browser, so even a basic laptop is sufficient.
For each job function, Peach provides the tools and data employees need to do their job.
For agents, Peach provides an integrated suite of servicing and collections tools including a loan management system, a customer relationship management (CRM) system, cases and workflows and communication tools.
For supervisors, Peach provides real-time performance and SLA reports, call analytics, and recordings so supervisors can coach agents, monitor trends, and ensure quality.
For back office and compliance personnel, Peach provides access to real-time data and audit trails.
Peach provides a full set of controls and permissions to restrict agent access to shift hours. We also run velocity checks to prevent data abuse, prevent data from being inappropriately copied or downloaded, and ensure agents are working from an approved remote location.
Scaling and Training for Increased Demand
Current and future public health crises may stretch the limits of existing call-center capacity and create the need to onboard temporary workers. Legacy servicing systems are difficult to learn and take weeks of in-person training to use properly. Peach provides servicing tools that are intuitive and easy for agents to use. New agents can be trained on the Peach platform in days, not weeks, to allow lenders to quickly scale up to meet increasing demand.
If you’d like to learn more about how Peach helps lenders modernize their servicing operation, please email us at info@peachfinance.com.
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About Peach
Peach is a cloud-native lending technology platform that helps fintechs and traditional financial institutions quickly launch new lending programs. Peach is the only lending platform built on an Adaptive Core™. The company’s fully integrated suite of API-based products includes a loan management system that supports virtually any non-mortgage asset class and features 250+ configuration variables; a suite of proprietary servicing tools, including a lending-specific CRM, borrower portal, agent portal, payment processing, communications, reporting and first-party collections tools; and Compliance Guard™, a proprietary compliance monitoring system. Peach can also accrue interest and generate repayment schedules during loan origination. Peach was built by leaders from top fintechs like Affirm, Avant and Prosper, who set out to create the most configurable, robust, compliance-forward and future-proof lending platform in the market. Learn more at peachfinance.com.