Why COVID-19 helped teach the need for remote servicing

Tech Talk

JUNE 21, 2020 21:54

ARBOX CEO and co-founder Alen Debensason (left) and co-founder Ran Lev. (photo credit: Courtesy) — ARBOX CEO and co-founder Alen Debensason (left) and co-founder Ran Lev.

(photo credit: Courtesy)

Easysend and Arbox are an example of some companies which increased their demand in the last few months, during COVID-19. Why is it? Both companies gave an interesting and essential solution for different businesses which enabled them to grow and exist in this difficult period.

“The COVID-19 taught us that digital is no longer optional”, said Tal Daskal, CEO and Founder of Easysend. “It is quickly becoming not just a matter of competitive advantage, but something that customers expect to receive.”

More than that, “in the next three years”, he adds, “digital will become the new normal. I believe that paperwork and bureaucracy across the board will transition to digital channels completely. Customers will no longer accept the inconvenience that comes with manual processes and paper forms. We are already seeing traditionally bureaucratic entities such as local governments, healthcare providers, and insurance companies moving towards self-service, digital era. Digital is becoming normalized, and it will become the norm soon”

Tal Daskal is the founder of EasySend. The company empowers insurance companies and financial institutions to quickly build and deploy digital processes in order to collect customer data and eSignatures in a simple and user-friendly way. During COVID-19, we saw a surge as companies rushed to fill in remote servicing gaps.

“Across the board, we have seen an increase of 43.7% in the usage of digital processes for all our customers. The two processes that stand out are; changing investment routes in pensions and pausing mortgage payments. On average, we have seen an increase in digital demand for the investment route change by 52%, and we had inquiries from nearly all our banking customers regarding developing a process for pausing mortgage payments”.

COVID-19 caused the company some unexpected surprises and changes, for example – building a mortgage freeze process for one of the Israeli largest banks. The process in question has been launched within 48 hours after receiving the request from the customer.

“There is no way that this bank could have released this process so quickly if it relied on internal capabilities alone”, said Tal. “Another common example is changing the investment route in pensions. As global markets take a hit, insured are rushing to protect their pension savings and are switching to conservative, low-risk investments and minimize their exposure to the stock market. We have detected a rise of nearly 50% for such processes across our pension fund customers.”

This is why, at Easysend, they believe digital is no longer optional. It is quickly becoming something that customers expect to receive.

“End customers are much less wary of using digital means. Even less digitally ‘savvy’ customers such as pensioners are increasingly using digital means for processes that they would have opted for dealing with the agent face-to-face before this crisis. Customers who are less digitally ‘savvy’ are more likely to use digital means than ever before and customers who are digitally savvy expect that even more services will become available on digital portals. Younger customers are likely to switch providers if they deem digital capabilities insufficient. We also see a significant move in government bodies, such as municipal governments in Europe who have been contacting us since the inception of the crisis to help them transition paperwork to digital channels as they can’t reach their constituents by regular means during the lockdown”.

In the same way, the pandemic has shut down the entire world, including the fitness industry. Arbox, an Israeli business management software, offers gym and studio owners a sleek, functional and easy-to-use platform to address all their critical needs; from enabling sales and customers, through employee management and payment processing, to member communication. The platform’s sleek Insights Dashboard equips owners with critical insights on how to grow their businesses.

In the last couple of years sports gyms and studios have become more than just a place to workout. The feeling of a community has evolved to be a prominent criterion when choosing a gym to join. Arbox addresses this challenge by enabling studio and gym-goers to create member profiles, invite friends to join a class, log their workouts and performance and track studio updates and personal milestones in a Facebook-like social feed. This feature has been received positively in Israel with 150,000 users in hundreds of gyms and studios.

“There has been incredible growth in the demand for healthy living around the world, and this is also true for Israel”, says Arbox co-founder and CEO Alen Debensason. “According to the data... during the first two weeks after the lockdown was over, Israelis have purchased sports memberships worth more than NIS 50 million. The features we have developed in our app enables athletes to feel safe and workout without being bothered whether people around them are ill. This also includes the access to the information needed in case a coronavirus case has been detected at the gym. These join our regular benefits and features that are meant to ensure gym owners are getting the best out of their business.”