Credit Management January February 2024

CONSUMER CREDIT
DON’T BLAME
THE MONKEY
Just because you can use Artificial Intelligence,
doesn’t mean you should.
BY ALAN DAVIS
THE Bard still influences our everyday
language, hundreds of years after his
work was published. Will humans be
quoting the Bard or an AI derivative
in a hundred years’ time? In trying to
answer that question one is reminded
of the anonymous maxim: making
predictions is difficult, especially about the future!
Initially we were sceptical that AI could bring significant
improvements to our human powered call centre. The credit
industry is tasked with managing difficult interactions
and pretty much always with pesky, messy, and often
unpredictable humans. Could AI take the place of a human
in handling difficult situations, and can it make better
decisions than humans? More importantly, should it?
If the question is simply ‘Can AI make ‘better’ decisions
than a human’ then, the jury is still out. If the question is
whether we should allow AI to take a decision in the first
place, the answer is unequivocally ‘no’. Imagine if an airline
were to put a monkey in the pilot’s seat of a fully loaded
Boeing 747 and the plane crashes. No one is going to blame
the monkey!
AI in voice recognition
AI has found its way into high-volume voice recognition
for interactive call routing. For smaller or niche call centre
undertakings, however, the current voice interactive
applications do not appear to offer sufficient value for our
purposes although the technology is progressing and will
likely become ubiquitous.
To help visualise our journey with AI so far, consider the
following thought experiment: Take a laptop and laser
printer back to the 1960’s and plug it in on a desk of a
100-strong typing pool. The most accurate and quickest
typist in the pool would type a letter, press print, and
conclude there is little or no benefit. The benefit of error
correction whilst typing would not help a competent
typist. If a lesser typist were then given the equipment and
shown spell check, they would soon catch up with the most
competent typist. Now imagine showing someone templates
and mail merge. Within just a handful of days that person
would be able to produce more accurate letters than the rest
of the typing pool put together.
Most companies, even if they don’t realise it, can have literally
thousands of algorithms running quietly in the background.
Algorithms are so prevalent that we barely think of them
in those terms. Starting with something as basic as ‘If days
O/D >30, print reminder’ algorithms quickly grow arms and
legs and even appear to produce spooky outputs that could
require hours to figure out why a particular dunning letter
was sent or why was a customer’s account was placed on
stop after posting a payment!
Tangible benefits
Creating, testing, and improving algorithms is the AI use
case we have found particularly beneficial. AI has helped
us make changes with immediate and tangible benefits in
numerous areas. Reductions of suspense payments, data
matching and even work list distributions have all been
improved. In fact, all our critical algorithms have in some
way been touched by AI, bringing benefits that may be
extremely subtle or huge improvements in accuracy and
resulting in hours being saved every day.
Training material is often just text with a smattering
of stock photos, or even, 1990s clip art. By using AI, we
have overhauled our training material and created high
quality and engaging material. This then quickly translates
to all internal communications and we now create
captivating images, text and even quality videos supporting
internal messaging. A previously generic template to
convey mundane information now looks like a poster for
the latest blockbuster movie in less time than it takes
to say AI.
Brave | Curious | Resilient / www.cicm.com / January & February 2024 / PAGE 22