CASE STUDY
ADDRESSING THE DREADED ‘MONEY CONVERSATION’
Sue Tabbitt spoke to UK rent-to- own retailer BrightHouse about making the difficult business of credit repayments much friendlier to customers
N
o one likes to talk about money, even less so when it’s to do with something
they owe. That’s why UK rent-to-own retailer BrightHouse has devoted a lot of effort to changing the conversation. BrightHouse, based in Watford, turns over £330m a year. It sells top-brand technology as well as
desirable sofas and bedroom furniture and makes all of these items available through credit, in the form of low weekly payments, which allows customers to spread the cost and get the items they need. BrightHouse currently has 286 stores
serving more than 270,000 customers across the UK. To maintain high levels of service, the company depends on technology that can help it keep close to customers by ensuring the right dialogue. Managing and collecting arrears is a
critical element of credit management and in BrightHouse’s case this is handled at store level, to promote personal relationships with customers. But increasingly this has presented a challenge
52 Autumn 2014
to efficiency, as each collection team was effectively working as a silo - manually calling customers about their credit arrangements and payments. As the business grew, this was
becoming an increasingly costly and unproductive use of time. “It was a repetitive and uninspiring experience for the team members making the call, and was hardly an ideal start to a conversation with customers,” says Alasdair Skeoch, BrightHouse’s head of credit operations. BrightHouse needed to make a change,
both for the sake of customers and for the efficiency of the credit operations team. “We wanted to spend more time having productive conversations with customers,” said Skeoch. He wanted a solution that would allow the collections team to improve the quality of the customer experience and boost efficiency by reducing manual dialling - cutting costs and allowing staff to focus on more value- add activities for customers. Based on previous experience of customer contact
technology, Alasdair knew that if the company chose the right solution it would be able to vary customer campaigns by customer circumstances and preferences. If BrightHouse could catch customers
at exactly the right time and in exactly the right way, customers would be happier and the results for the business would increase significantly. This led Brighthouse to VoiceSage, which specialises in real-time ‘best-time-to-contact’ intelligence which ensures that companies get the maximum results from using its software-based services. The technology would allow BrightHouse to talk to customers at the times they were most likely to respond. VoiceSage then automatically updates the dialler file multiple times throughout the business day with details of buyers who have brought their accounts up to date. BrightHouse opted for VoiceSage’s cloud-based Interactive Voice Message (IVM) technology and complementary intelligence engine. Together these provide a simple, flexible messaging platform,
www.retailtechnology.co.uk
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