Application processing

If you require potential customers to apply for your goods or services, you need to make sound decisions about whom to accept based on the information they provide. This is the case if you’re a credit grantor working within finance, insurance, healthcare, telecoms, utilities or manufacturing. In fact, even as a public sector body, you probably need to consider applications for a number of your services, such as welfare support, grants and even applications for identity documents such as passports.

Making the right decisions will depend on whether the potential customer is eligible for what they are applying, your certainty of their identity, the associated risk of fraud, and your determination of their ability to reliably make repayments. Additionally, in sectors such as financial services, regulations exist to protect consumers from being sold products and services that they cannot afford. Your decision making, therefore, also will be guided by regulatory structure.

The most important thing to be aware of, however, is that your customers’ priority is the timely processing of their applications; some even may want an instant decision. When faced with a large volume of applications, it is business critical that processing is not only done quickly, but cost-effective.

The challenge today is how to keep processing costs down and enhance the customer experience

Automating the decision-making process can keep costs down and ensure the prospective customer has a great experience. The automation process can:

• Confirm if your prospect meets all the right criteria and qualifies to become a valued customer of your business, identifying the right customers for you.
• Process information in real time, providing a great experience.
• Redirect the process workflow if there is a discrepancy with the information supplied, allowing a support team to deal with the decision manually.
• Link to IT and fulfilment services to personalize communications materials, set up new accounts and much more for your approved new customer.

However, in order to do this, the automated system will require robust, reliable, up-to-date and integrated data about your prospective customer and a framework based on business rules, legal requirements and industry best practice in which it can automate the decision-making process. How do you set up such a sophisticated system?

Experian^® can help you:

Process applications quickly and efficiently – we provide end-to-end processing systems with automated decision making to increase straight-through processing.

Automate decision-making processes – we automate decision-making processes to free your staff to focus on more critical tasks.

Create flexible systems – our systems enable you to create and change decision-making rules quickly and without requiring major IT and software costs.

Improve your decision making – we provide high-quality data and predictive analytics that provide tried-and-tested input to your decision-making process.

Simplify compliance – we can help you automate decisioning for greater consistency and to instantly authenticate identities.