The Challenges of Telephony.
Communicating with your customer effectively is vital, but that’s not going to happen if they don’t want to talk to you!
Unless you can make it easy and comfortable for them to want to communicate, you won’t understand why they are in arrears or how to treat them. Or put another way, if you don’t know your customer, you can’t treat them fairly.
Over the next few months, we are going to approach all aspects of customer contact, including chatbots, customer portals, email, and SMS, all of which are used to reduce outbound calling volumes. We start however with telephony, as this channel may be the first contact you have been able to make, should the customer not be able or want to use other channels.
Although the use of telephones within collections has been reduced as digital communication has increased, we certainly need to keep outbound calling as a prime method of contact. Why? Because when dealing with complex situations it can be the most effective method to gather information from your customer.
Do I know enough about my customer to conduct an effective conversation?
What you can do for yourself
Check whether your system provides all the information your agent needs, such as easy-to-see details of the customer and the account and, if applicable, other related accounts.
Test whether you as a senior credit professional would have the necessary information to elicit a positive response. If not, at least you are able to direct the customer to the right person easily and quickly, or you will lose their confidence and probably an opportunity to make a connection again.
What Optimus can help you achieve
The answer is to have a system that can be designed for your business, with the key items of information at the agents’ fingertips. Optimus provides the agent with all relevant information, with client-definable roles.
Our data ribbons enable the agent to view all relevant account and personal information, while action ribbons that are user definable provide real-time, measurable and compliant actions at a keystroke.
Next, ask yourself, Can I see all current customer interactions?
What you can do for yourself
Check whether your outbound team are aware of any recent contact that can change the narrative, or indeed the work queue? Most importantly, is the queue responsive to recent payments, that may have been made the same day, or, within the last hour?
Does your agent have sufficient flexibility to provide fit-for-purpose, sustainable arrangements within acceptable parameters for your business, that demonstrates the competence of your business to the customer?
What Optimus can help you achieve
Optimus provides the ability for real-time processing, with all data, events, payments, and actions updated immediately. The agent/team real-time KPI dashboard provides continuously updated desktop displays and performance targets (view set based on specific roles in the organization).
With 1-to-1 Collection Strategies, the agent can easily design and apply repayment options that better align with each debtor’s situation and communication preference.
My last questions are whether your current systems achieve the above? Can you identify your customers’ needs easily and quickly and provide the service they need?
What you can do for yourself
Conduct an audit of your system, with you as the agent. Score it against your key performance indicators to measure what needs changing and more importantly, how easily and quickly it can be changed.
What Optimus can help you achieve
The Optimus collections software system provides a higher level of agility, responsiveness, control, user-friendliness, and automation than what was previously needed. It fully supports omnichannel collection strategies. It can connect and interact bi-directionally through the consumer’s preferred communication channel(s) – telephony, email, text, portal, mail, and/or mobile app – while crucially remaining compliant with ever-changing regulations.
Regulators across all industries now insist that we treat both financial and physical vulnerability in a consistent, measurable manner. The bottom line is just that. If we can communicate effectively with our customers; make them want to contact us when circumstances change, we have a far better chance of making sustainable and fair arrangements for payment.
Why not contact us to arrange an informal discussion on how Telrock can help your organisation with its collection operations?
About the Writer
Following an executive management board role with an operating subsidiary of Lloyds Banking Group, Bruce Turnbull has spent the past 20 years providing collections management consultancy services to several blue-chip lending companies including Courts International,
GE Capital, and Provident Group.
More recently Bruce has served as Managing Director of two UK operating subsidiaries of CoreLogic, Inc. (NYSE: CLGX), a $3 billion-dollar global data, analytics, and related services company. Bruce is currently a Director of the Vulnerability Registration Service and provides business consultancy to Telrock Systems.
About Telrock Systems
Telrock Systems is a global technology provider of modern cloud-based collections and recovery software solutions for creditors and 3rd party consumer collections organizations wanting improved functionality and smarter capabilities. Our flagship solution, Optimus, is an enterprise-wide collections and recovery software platform built new from the ground up. It leverages open-source technology, powerful cloud computing, PCI DSS compliance, and more intelligent designs resulting in the broadest and richest collections and recovery Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering in the market. We provide our solutions in North America and Latin America (LATAM) from our Atlanta office, and in Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA), and Asia Pacific (ASPAC) from our London, UK office.