Symend’s Co-Founders, Hanif Joshaghani and Tiffany Kaminsky, presented at the annual Scotiabank Telecom, Media and Technology (TMT) Conference alongside leading enterprises such as Rogers, Verizon and Cogeco Communications on March 30, 2021. Hanif and Tiffany joined Jeff Fan, Telecom, Cable and Media Analyst, and Paul Steep, Technology Analyst, at Scotiabank Global Banking and Markets for a discussion about why treating customers with empathy drives engagement and repayment. Hanif and Tiffany spoke about the following topics.
Leading with empathy through experience
Hanif is a serial entrepreneur that has raised over $150 million across the four companies he has founded with several exits to-date. After his most recent exit, he began searching for a new opportunity that mattered deeply to him. Hanif grew up in refugee camps and immigrated to Canada at a young age where his family was constantly bombarded by collections calls from 1-800 numbers. After recognizing that traditional collections outreach had gone largely unchanged, he teamed up with Tiffany to start Symend. As a young adult, Tiffany ran into trouble with her first credit card and saw first-hand how damaging the experience could be. Both Hanif and Tiffany saw this as an opportunity to build a great company that could help people around the world avoid the stress and shame that comes with falling behind on bills.
Increasing customer lifetime value
Symend’s Co-Founders saw an important opportunity for enterprises to build better relationships with their customers in both good times and bad. The chance to build brand loyalty and create customer lifetime value can start and end with a negative experience. Traditional collections outreach methods like outbound dialing are both unfair, and ineffective. Ultimately, these methods lead to negative outcomes such as churn, suspension, as well as unnecessary inbound and outbound calls. By taking a digital-first, personalized approach to engaging customers, these numbers decline drastically while increasing customer satisfaction.
A technology as unique as customers
Symend offers a comprehensive solution through its Behavioral Engagement Technology™. The enterprise-ready technology ingests and unifies massive amounts of consumer data and provides dynamic orchestration capabilities, all while ensuring continuous optimization through advanced analytics. By leveraging behavioral science and data-driven insights, Symend continuously personalizes interactions with the customer. Its white-label solution helps enterprise protect their brand experience while engaging past due customers who are anywhere from 2-days to 120-days behind, with the goal of preventing their bills from reaching third-party assignment. This is done through personalized communications, self-serve tools and flexible repayment options that empower customers to act.
Creating a consistently positive experience
When empathy and kindness are demonstrated in a consistent manner, customer relationships become stronger. There is an art and science to every message your customer receives, which is why Symend’s technology is the most efficient and effective way to consistently provide a positive experience. Symend’s deep understanding of customers and what empowers them to act only becomes more powerful as more customers are served across the customer lifecycle, leading the ROI to expand on both sides. As Symend expands into customer retention and acquisition, the opportunities to learn from customers at all stages will generate insights that can be actioned to raise the bar for all aspects of the customer experience.
Post-pandemic outlook
Symend has insights from engaging millions of customers and deeply understands the reasons why customers fall behind, and what empowers them to get caught up. Throughout the pandemic, Symend has observed that customers are getting caught up on bills due to factors such as less spending during lockdowns as well as government assistance programs. When the economy fully reopens and government subsidies end, we expect that consumers will “revenge spend” to make up for the past under-spending, resulting in an uptick in past due customers. Symend can prevent massive upticks by proactively engaging customers, educating them on the negative impact of falling behind and seamlessly adapting with changing customer behavior.
