Credit, Collections & Insolvency News
Some people say they love change. But mostly in job interviews.
If we’re really honest with ourselves, lots of change can make even the most optimistic and resilient amongst us that little bit nervous. But none of us can avoid it, especially now. Business as usual isn’t usual anymore as life and work are taking on new shapes and meanings.
Agility used to be for dog sport and developers, now it’s a life and work skill for all of us. We need to adapt in the face of change and help our customers to adapt too.
There’s been a huge shift in customer behaviour over recent years, and the collections industry sometimes struggles to keep pace. The basic brief – increasing returns – remains the same, but the way we go about our business must flex in line with customer needs and expectations. Here are three approaches that are working for us:
Engage customers where they are
As people become increasingly digital-savvy, brands and services need to be where their customers are. Debt collection via phone is antiquated and ineffective. Most customers don’t want to chat about debt. Of course, you need to make it easy for them to get in touch with you via phone if that’s their preferred channel, but experience shows it rarely is. Organisations looking to maximise the efficiency of their Collections need to make it easy for customers to interact with them, and customers like to mix and match between email, text, chat and social media.
An omni-channel approach is a must-have in today’s digital-first world. It enables customers to engage with companies when, where and how they want: from the privacy of their homes, on the channel of their choice and at a time convenient to them.
Be personal, at scale
Personal doesn’t mean overusing your customer’s first name in your outbound comms. That’s just creepy. What it does mean is listening to and understanding what each individual really needs, and then tailoring your messaging and your approach so your customer feels heard.
It’s hard enough to keep one person happy all the time, and even tricker to make customer engagement work at scale. But work at scale it must, because budgets are increasingly tight. This is where AI and Analytics can really add value to debt collection. They uncover insights about customers and help you to learn what works and what doesn’t so your customer engagement continuously improves.
AI-powered chatbots can listen and respond to customer sentiment, deal with simple requests at lightening speed and escalate those enquiries that would benefit from associate intervention. This means your customers get what they need faster and your agents are freed up from repetitive enquiries and have more time to do what humans do best.
Empower customers
Successful debt collection requires customer engagement, and customer engagement is a movement with its roots in empowerment. We need to give customers the confidence to take control of their debt by enabling them to be part of the solution not the problem.
I’ve talked about the importance of a choice of channels, and personal communications, but they need to be combined with an empathetic and compassionate attitude towards your customers. As an industry we need to be more flexible, allowing customers to build their own payment plans and make incremental changes over time in sync with their changing financial situation and the changing economic context.
An engaging, empowering and respectful approach to debt collection delivers results, time and again, and at scale. As well as increasing net yield by 101%, one of our banking clients has seen a dramatic increase in both employee and customer engagement scores.
Could it be time to change your approach to debt collection?
If your answer is “yes”, and if you’d like to talk more about supercharging the collections experience, please get in touch here. In whatever channel suits you best.
*Steve will be part of a panel discussing Customer Engagement at the forthcoming Online Collections Technology Think Tanks. Join Steve at the event on Thursday 3rd February from 9.30 am. The Customer Engagement session will begin at 10.45am.