The Emotional Toll of Choosing Which Bills to Pay - Helping Your Customers Navigate Financial Hardship

The Emotional Toll of Choosing Which Bills to Pay - Helping Your Customers Navigate Financial Hardship

Financial stability feels like a dream for many. Deciding how to prioritize household expenses can be a stressful juggling act.

In a recent survey by CNBC, 65% of 4,000 adults polled said they live paycheck to paycheck. Further, a survey done by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia reports that one in three Americans making six-figure salaries are worried about paying their bills.

How can you support your customers when they need you most?

The Burden of Prioritization

When people find themselves with insufficient income or unexpected expenses, the process of bill prioritization becomes a delicate balancing act. Decision fatigue, a person’s inability to make additional decisions after making many, occurs when people weigh the pros and cons of which bill to pay, in which order. As funds dwindle, the fear of repercussions from missed payments lingers in the background. The stress is not only financial; it affects mental health, relationships, performance at work or school, and overall well being.

Feelings of guilt or shame often accompany financial hardships. Not being able to adequately provide for oneself or family members and the reluctance to admit the struggle to friends or loved ones can lead to isolation and reluctance to seek help. This further exacerbates the situation.

Be There When Your Customers Need You Most

Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. If your customer is experiencing financial hardship, they are choosing whether to prioritize payment for your service over all the bills they have. Missing payments doesn’t mean someone is a bad person - it means they just need a little time to get back on their feet.

Think about the impact of cutting off service when your customer is struggling financially:

• An unemployed person needs their phone in order to be able to respond to prospective employers.
• Someone struggling to make ends meet needs a little more time to make their mortgage payment rather than face moving their family due to foreclosure.
• A student needs their internet in order to participate at school.
• In many cases, a vehicle is required to go to and from school and work.

These are very real scenarios that anyone can find themselves in. Job loss, soaring interest rates and the increased cost of living has left many people and families scrambling to come up with a financial solution to a problem they didn’t have a few years ago.

Providing your customers with a support system when they need your service most results in higher customer retention rates and brand loyalty.

Your customers will remember how you treat them, and you move higher up on their list of priorities.

Help Your Customers at Scale

KredosAi works with companies to put a plan in place to help your customers make payment arrangements by finding the right message, sent at the right time, using the right channel that inspires them to respond, rather than hide from a collections call.

Leveraging human-centric AI combined with strategies grounded in over 50 years of behavioral economics research, our platform uses machine learning to execute multi-variate reinforcement learning algorithms. This means that you can work with your customers who have fallen behind to get the desired results for you and them. And, you can do it at scale.

Compassion and Understanding are Paramount

Addressing the effects of financial hardship requires empathy and support systems that recognize the complexities of financial instability.

By implementing systems and processes rooted in compassion, companies can work with customers to retain their business and provide services to help get people back on their feet.

KredosAi is proud to work with our customers to foster a culture of understanding by providing a secure platform and an empathetic process to drive mutual results for companies and their customers.