LendUp Helps Customers Personally, Runs Their Call Center Programmatically With TaskRouter

LendUp Helps Customers Personally, Runs Their Call Center Programmatically With TaskRouter

When you’re trapped in a cycle of debt and it’s hard to figure out how to get out, and who to turn to. LendUp works with people who have less than stellar credit to not only offer them loans, but offer them a path back to financial health, a process they call the LendUp ladder.

Short term lenders often build their business models on opaque terms and hidden fees. They lure prospective customers with the promise of quick cash, burying the costs and interest rate in the fine print. Unsuspecting customers are eager to apply, only to realize the costs when it’s too late.

LendUp, a tech startup whose first product is an alternative to payday loans, is looking to disrupt the traditional payday loan industry by fixing what’s wrong: presenting clear terms, conditions, and pricing; eliminating ‘hidden’ fees; and getting rid of ‘rollovers’ that can balloon into a debt trap for unsuspecting customers.

Meeting Urgent Needs By Using The Right Tools

When LendUp’s customers contact them, it’s typically urgent. Money matters rarely come without a hard deadline.

LendUp wants to deliver a type of customer experience that might be unfamiliar — a timely and personal one. If their customers called a short term lender’s customer support center, odds are they weren’t taken care of in a timely manner.

LendUp makes personal phone support a priority. This is no small feat considering they made 55,000 calls to customers and received 81,000 calls from customers in June alone.

Quality phone support dramatically expedites customers’ application process and gets their customers on the path to better credit. The (fortunate) problem is that a ton of people want better credit. So, the phones are always ringing. LendUp uses Twilio TaskRouter to make sure the right call gets to the right person programmatically.

LendUp Chooses TaskRouter

Before LendUp discovered TaskRouter, they were already building an internal tool to manage calls more effectively. They wanted to intelligently route customers calls to different specialists by programmatically ascribing attributes to the call that tell TaskRouter where to send the call.

For example, if a customer needed to fill out an application over the phone, that call should go to agent A. A service queue should go to agent B. Prioritized customer calls should go to agent C. Using TaskRouter, LendUp can write their own call routing logic, and let TaskRouter do the heavy lifting.

“TaskRouter satisfied 100% of our needs,” says Joseph Moniz, Software Engineer at LendUp. “This was the fastest development timeline I’ve ever had.” Moniz and the LendUp team had about a week of development work, and then put their Twilio powered contact center solution through to testing and production.

“Using a system we built ourself, powered by TaskRouter, has enabled us to build a lot of operational efficiency,” says Moniz. With TaskRouter firmly in place at LendUp, they can spend less time manually directing calls, and more time directing their customers to better credit.