Release Notes 02/18/2024

Deploy

You can expect up to an hour of downtime to deploy this release.

In This Issue:

• Optimizing Your Experience and Maximizing Productivity

• Rainmaker AI Chatbot

• VA 2.0 Miranda Notices

• VA 2.0 Contact Us

• VA 2.0 Letter QR Codes

• VA Visible Document Referencing from Email Demographic

• Email Profile Roles

• No-Contact Blocked Result

• Line Breaks in Letter Reports

• Intelligent Failure & Reschedule for Credit Cards

Optimizing Your Experience and Maximizing Productivity

At InterProse, we're excited to announce enhancements aimed at boosting performance across the crucial aspects of your reporting and workflow management.

Updates include fine-tuning your dashboard agent productivity panels, dashboard productivity panels and revamping the file download dashboard, now called "Recent Files to Download," and offering you access to the latest 50 available files in record time.

We've prioritized speed across functions like debt flag insertion as well as retrieval of payment schedules, collector information, and dispute or bankruptcy records. We've also implemented intelligent caching mechanisms to minimize unnecessary database overhead and ensure swift API calls.

By reducing unnecessary database calls and only saving changes to columns and positions in lists when necessary, we've improved page loading times across ACE UI pages.

Rainmaker AI Chatbot

When a consumer interacts with Rainmaker, the AI chatbot will now return a link along with its response message when it is able to determine a useful link to provide. Examples are as follows:

If Rainmaker understands the consumer to be:

1. Chatting for the first time, it will likely provide them an auto-link to the details page where they can view a list of their accounts, an auto-link where they can make a payment or enter payment arrangements or both.

2. Mentioning the use of an attorney or an intent to sue the customer, it will include a polite response with an auto-link to the VA 2.0 Contact Us page.

3. Suggesting the intent to dispute the account, it will provide an auto-link to the VA 2.0 Dispute page.

4. Indicating a death, it will express condolences and request a copy of the death certificate and provide an auto-link to the VA 2.0 Document page.

5. Requesting that contact stop, it will politely ask them to submit the request on the website and redirect them to the VA 2.0 Contact Us page.

VA 2.0 Miranda Notices

Virtual Agent 2.0 has been updated so that Miranda Notices appear not only the first time a consumer logs directly into ACE, but also when the consumer logs into ACE using an auto-login link or using an SSO option (Google or Facebook).

VA 2.0 Contact Us

The behavior of the VA 2.0 Contact Us page has been updated. There will now be different behavior in each of the following three scenarios:

1. If chat is not enabled, the consumer will be presented with the default contact us page.

2. If chat and Rainmaker are both enabled, the contact us page will include a selectable option at the top of the page to chat with the AI Assistant.

3. If chat is enabled and an Agent is available, the consumer will be presented with the chat page instead of the contact us page.

Letter QR Codes

A new field is available for use in LibreOffice letter templates. When added to a letter template, it will inject a QR code that a consumer can scan from their phone or other mobile device to auto-login to VA 2.0.

Please use this link for more the details related to configuring and using a QR code: Generating QR Code for Auto-Login Link to VA 2.0.

VA Visible Document Referencing from Email Demographic

An agent can now insert VA 2.0 document auto-links directly from the Account Email Demographic page. Specific fields will need to be in any of the email profiles that will be used for this purpose and they will be empty if no document is selected.

For more information about configuring and using this option, please refer to the ACE Help article on Sending Emails with Document Links from the Demographic Email Page.

VA Visible Document Referencing from Email Demographic

Important Note: This feature was erroneously included in the February release notes and is not currently available. It will be mentioned again in future release notes when it becomes available. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Email Profile Roles

Letters and text messages profiles in ACE have Send and Edit Role IDs that govern who has permission to send or edit them. Email profiles now also have fields where send and edit roles may be applied.

Please Note:

in the example below, the default LETTER_SEND & LETTER_EDIT roles are being used to populate the Email Profile Roles. Keep in mind that if you use the same roles, the same users who have the roles will have access to send or edit the profiles where they are applied.

No-Contact Blocked Result

There is a new Result (No-Contact) option of "BLOCKED" available for selection when recording phone call results.

• If a phone demographic record already existed with the phone number associated with the blocked phone log record, the phone number status does not change.

• If not, the status will automatically be set to an inactive status at the time the blocked phone log record is created.

Line Breaks in Letter Reports

Line breaks can now be put in SQL Letter Loops (for local print letter templates).

Below is a simple example showing these components of this process:

• The report (on the left)

  • Data before and after the line breaks must be concatenated together

  • The line break in this PostgreSQL is represented by E'\n'

  • The data is concatenated together using two pipes ||

  • The data will only be represented as expected in the resulting letter

• The LibreOffice template (in the middle)

• The resulting letter (on the right)

To configure a letter using this option, please refer to the ACE Help article on SQL Letter Loops (for local print letter templates).

Intelligent Failure & Reschedule for Credit Cards

In October 2023, we introduced an option to prevent an ACH payment plan from deactivating when a single NSF occurred on the plan.

In January 2024, we introduced an option so an ACH NSF that does not deactivate a plan can be added back to the end of the payment plan.

This month we are introducing the ability to apply the same NSF behavior to Credit Card payment failures in a payment plan.

Please note:

in order for this feature to work for matching transactions, the credit card payment processor must be returning a processor message of "Insufficient Funds" or "NSF". Nuvei and RePay are returning failures with those messages.

Fixed These:

• Scheduling a validation notice letter manually via ELS through the ACE user interface was not populating the validation sent date. Now it is.

• When a consumer entered payment credentials in VA 2.0 and the payment failed, the wallet was being updated. That is no longer happening.

• A 500 Internal Error was being presented after a member of a bundle group was paid in full. The problem has been fixed.

• When VA Last Login or Bundle VA Last Login were added to the summary an error was being displayed. That has been corrected.

• If a consumer sent a chat message while an agent was typing a chat response, the agent's response was being overwritten by an automated message from Rainmaker (when enabled). That is no longer happening.

• When speed posting one payment to an account after another, after entering the next account number and amount, the account with the previous entry was being displayed in the search and bundle sections of the page. That has been fixed.

• Consumers using iPhones were unable to download documents from VA 2.0 successfully. They are able to do so now.

• The Do Not Txt Boolean field in the Account Page Debt Information section was not preventing the ACE system from sending out text messages. That has been fixed.

• The debt group customer identifier field was not previously available to be added to ITMS templates. It is now.

• The payment plan remaining payment count field was not previously populating when added to ITMS templates. It is now.

• Users were unable to override default service fee amounts when modifying payment plans. That has been fixed.

• There was a scenario where a consumer might erroneously overpay an account by sequentially entering the same payment twice in a row on VA 2.0. That has been fixed.

• The Invoice Profile Filename Override was updating the downloadable invoice files but was not displaying the updated filename when viewed by client access users. That has been fixed.

• There was a problem sorting transactions by agency # in the Invoice Details. That has been corrected.

• VA 2.0 was not respecting the most restrictive values for maximum payments between VA Profile and Client configurations. It is now.