Collections and Recoveries have always been seen as a necessary evil, yet without this function, economies gradually stall and the knock-on effect to the customers can be seen in spaces like lending or obtaining finance.
Poor collections process results in those issuing finance adopting greater criteria to meet thresholds and increased rigour in application processes.
At a recent Collections debate, it was highlighted by key stakeholders in this space, that as the customer base gets younger, their expectations shift. They expect to engage with a swipe, 2-clicks, or with gestures as a norm.
Are you changing fast enough?
The common consensus from that debate was that the internal process must be flexible to accommodate a changing market. Your tech, CRM and infrastructure must be able to adapt to new and growing channels like Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, Self-service technology etc.
This doesn’t mean you reduce full-time employees, strip out your dialler, or tear up your collections strategy – not at all, these will always be needed as they are the basis of your collections remit, but it does mean you should know how to install and adapt your offering to make you stand out, to give you a cutting edge in communication, and to strip out the cost of servicing and collecting from end-users. Remove the friction and use the channels that are expected from you.
Staying in control of your collections strategy
AI and machine learning is currently a hot topic for debt collection agencies but many feel uncomfortable about giving up a level of control over the implementation of their strategy. While AI has its benefits from learning how to decide the best next action based on data feeds, behaviours and learnings, but Collections as a sector doesn’t need to be complicated. It doesn’t need this level of complexity to fulfil a relatively straight forward process.
There are ways to bridge this workstream – automate a process with a tech partner that can fulfil the right channels of choice mentioned above, and initiate and consume data feeds to ensure you’re in control at any given time.
How Mobile Collections fits with your strategy![Illustrative example of a Mobile Collections strategy for a debt collection agency]()
The customer receives a personalised SMS with a URL linking them to a fully branded customer portal where they can manage close to every account activity that can currently be discussed on a call via an agent. After completing identification and validation, the customer will be presented with a series of options where they can choose to make a payment, set up affordable arrangements, complete, save and view intelligent IE’s, set up Direct Debits or CPAs and have multiple ways to talk to your business, all geared to be digital-first.
We call this process Mobile Collections.
Mobile Collections offer a complete end-to-end automated way to engage with your customer on a channel that is branded to your business or a white-label solution. By providing self-serve, flexible tools that utilise the very features your customers expect to engage with – the UI on their phones, Debt Purchasers and DCAs will be able to increase the chances of engagement and collecting funds and save in-house resource by automating previously manual processes.
While this level of automation clearly brings a beneficial experience your customers but how does it benefit you as a business – you as our customer, also need to get the same level of autonomy in the solution.
All data feeds from your CRM to us and back, are end-to-end automated, triggering next actions based on customer engagement and behaviours, with your business needs, strategies and goals forming the basis of this decision unit – removing the need for any manual involvement in the process.
As an average when using Mobile Collections for the DCA space, we’ve seen a click-through rate of 75% (from the initial SMS), with 55.5% of customers who clicked through going on to make a full payment.
What are the next steps?
Every customer is different and as such, we’d really like to speak to you to better understand your challenges and exactly how we think Mobile Collections could help. Nothing is out the box – it is all built to your spec, with your needs and goals.
The friction isn’t just removed from your customers point of view, it is removed from adopting and installing our technology to complement your business offering too.
To find out how, please get in contact with our team today by calling 0345 356 5758 or emailing [email protected]
