Openpay Transforms Its Contact Center to Gain a 360-Degree View of Customers and Support Growth

Openpay Group Ltd. is making waves in the growing buy now, pay later (BNPL) payment solutions industry with their buy now, pay smarter (BNPS) products. The fintech—which delivers flexible payment plans, including loan durations of 2–24 months and amounts of up to $20,000—recently grew its customer base by 21 percent and saw its revenue rise by 70 percent. 

However, Openpay’s cloud-based customer contact center technology couldn’t support its growth. Specifically, it didn’t include needed features like customer relationship management (CRM) integration, speech analytics, or personalization. Most important, the solution didn’t integrate with the company’s business critical Zendesk CRM system, and call center agents had to go back and forth between Zendesk and the contact center solution. Agents had to manually open a new ticket in Zendesk and search the system to obtain information on the customer or call history. This increased time to serve each customer and impacted the overall customer experience.

Frank Belardo, head of customer service operations at Openpay, says, “Our agents wasted time, and it also made it seem like we didn’t know a lot about the customer. We needed to have a centralized, full view of each customer to improve customer service.”

Another challenge was frequent contact center downtime, which led to lost revenue from customers dropping out of their plans and switching to competitors. Additionally, each time Openpay sought to integrate a new feature into the contact center solution, it had to deal with support issues and new licensing fees. “It sometimes took a day for the solution vendor to get back to us, and it was costly to make each change,” Belardo says. “We wanted to have a single view of the customer, integrate both systems, and reduce costs.”

Openpay was already running key applications, such as data analysis workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and decided to implement Amazon Connect, a cloud-based omnichannel contact center solution. Amazon Connect provides a single intuitive user interface for call routing, queuing, and analytics and helps Openpay build high-quality voice and interactive chat experiences to serve its customers from anywhere.

The fintech implemented the solution and integrated it with Zendesk in just four weeks, ahead of its six-week timeline. It also implemented Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology to help users follow customer sentiments and conversations in real time to identify company feedback. With Contact Lens, Openpay’s call center supervisors can use text call transcript searchers to troubleshoot customer issues, and the company can identify friction areas such as why conversations are taking too long.

Furthermore, the Amazon Connect consumption-based pricing model allows Openpay to eliminate licensing fees for agents and pay for each system change or integration. As a result, the business saves 30 percent in operating costs.

By using Amazon Connect, Openpay has integrated its contact center solution with Zendesk to gain better customer insights, such as previous interactions and reported issues, while reducing costs. “Our agents can access call history in just a click, allowing them to quickly serve customers with no awkward pauses. This has helped us improve our overall level of customer service,” says Belardo.

Openpay is using the data derived from Contact Lens to adopt a more proactive approach to customer service. The business can access call log transcriptions to obtain customer feedback, helping it improve technical issues. Openpay is also using this data to obtain feedback from merchants by vertical. “If we’re getting a lot of calls from merchants in a particular vertical, such as automotive, we can zoom in and identify if there are any specific issues or if more training is required.”

The cost savings gained from adopting Amazon Connect allow the business to reinvest savings into new capabilities like AI. The company is now looking at integrating additional Amazon Connect and Contact Lens functionality, such as post-call surveys and chatbots. “We’re constantly streamlining our customer service to give our customers a better experience,” Belardo says. “Amazon Connect is the right technology to support that goal.”