Budget Power Automates 90%+ of Collection Calls, Saving 40 Labor Hours Per Week and Closing Language Gaps

Executive Summary

• Company Profile: Budget Power is a Texas-based retail energy provider focused on supplying electricity to residential and small commercial consumers, emphasizing budget-friendly plans and customized customer service.

• Core Challenge: The outbound collection process was 100% human-handled, requiring a dedicated full-time employee (40 hours per week) and lacking real-time visibility and scalability.

• echowin's Solution: A customized, end-to-end AI agent solution for outbound delinquent calls, featuring hyper-personalization, dynamic voicemail/text message functionality, and real-time human transfer.

• Measured Impact:

• Time Savings: Saved 40 hours per week (one full-time employee).

• Automation: Over 90% of completed calls are handled without human intervention.

• Collection Rate: Achieved a comparable 60% - 70% collection success rate, with a 10% improvement in the collection-to-call volume metric tracked last month.

• Revenue Impact: Almost 88% of customers who received the payment link via text completed the payment.

The Challenge

Budget Power's core business model is built on budget-friendly electricity supply, but their delinquent accounts receivable (AR) process was a significant operational drain. Before echowin, the entire outbound collections process was managed by a human, consuming a full-time employee's schedule.

The key pain points included:

• Lack of Visibility: The previous solution offered minimal visibility into call outcomes and key performance indicators (KPIs), leading to "surprises when things are not going as we anticipated."

• Labor Intensive: Managing the calls required over 40 hours a week of dedicated staff time.

• Ineffective Missed Call Strategy: The team was dependent on generic voicemails, which were "not the most effective option in this day and time."

• Language Barrier Gaps: At times, Spanish-speaking personnel were unavailable, causing a gap in their service for bilingual customers.

Why echowin

Budget Power was introduced to echowin by a close investor whose company currently uses the platform. They were specifically searching for a customized outbound chatbot solution, which was uncommon in the marketplace at the time.

The decision was driven by three key factors:

1. Speed of Deployment: echowin was able to create a dummy solution in a matter of days and deploy the complete solution within a matter of weeks, which was critical. As Budget Power noted, "We couldn’t have been happier with this deployment process to be honest... it would have probably been sooner if it wasn’t for some third party variable data issues."

2. Budget-Friendly ROI: The primary metric for justification was replacing the 40-hour-per-week human intervention with an equally effective AI solution, justifying the cost savings immediately.

3. Accuracy and Understanding: echowin successfully met their exact needs based on a "simple document we had created for them," which made the development process "a lot smoother and easier for both sides and quicker."

Building the Solution

The echowin team provided an end-to-end service, handling the development, training, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of the AI agent, minimizing the lift required by Budget Power's internal teams.

The solution delivered key capabilities tailored for collections:

• Hyper-Personalization: The agent uses details from a simple Excel sheet upload (name, due amount, premise information) to customize the conversation for every recipient.

• Dynamic Missed Call Strategy: If a customer doesn't answer, the agent sends a contextual text message with a payment link, which is far more effective than a voicemail.

• Real-Time Adaptability: The agent not only handles Spanish-speaking customers from the greeting but can also "close that gap" when Spanish-speaking staff are unavailable covering 32 different languages.

• Seamless Human Transfer: The agent redirects calls to a human representative in real-time if a customer requests to speak to a person or asks to make a payment.

Results

The deployment of the echowin AI Agent delivered immediate, measurable results, transforming the collections team's efficiency and directly improving the bottom line.

Internal Team Feedback: The text message strategy is a game-changer. “Almost 88% of customers who received the payment link via text completed the payment.”

Customer Feedback: Budget Power reports that customers are "very happy to be getting a text message instead of just a phone call... now I know what the call was about."

Favorite Feature: The agent's functionality to instantly generate highly customized interactions by pulling individual account data—like due dates and amounts—from a single daily spreadsheet upload. "The ability to create and deploy new campaigns and solutions in a matter of minutes. As our business needs change, we can deploy a new sort of collection mentality."

— Tanveer Sayani, VP of Operations, Budget Power

Next Steps

Having established a successful collections automation blueprint, Budget Power is now scaling the solution to their sales and marketing channels.

"The next step will be deploying this on a sales side... We are rebranding our sales process altogether and hope early in the first quarter of next year to use the echowin solution for not only our AR and delinquency calls but also from a sales perspective."

— Tanveer Sayani, VP of Operations, Budget Power

The immediate next step is to use the AI agent for:

• Following up on leads that were previously missed or not converted.

• Making customers aware of new solutions to generate sales.

Ready to Redefine Your ROI?

Stop bothering your staff for repetitive calls. Budget Power saved 40 labor hours weekly and saw a 10% improvement in collection volume by automating over 90% of their calls in weeks, not months.

Request a demo to see the echowin AI Agent in action.