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In Focus Collections


LV: Profiling the role of a great collector, I would say that young people will empathise with young people, but life skills, managing their own money, having difficult and awkward conversations about vulnerability, or dealing with expressions of dissatisfaction is not where their skills lie. For that, you need, for example, someone who has worked for the emergency services, because they are used to being in a situation where the customer is stressed and you need to get some information from them, and to give them some instructions. They have been remarkable.


SS: It was always a traditional thing, in financial services, that if you had a black mark against your name, then you could not work for a bank; if you had a missed payment here or there, you could not get a job. Now those are the people, certainly within the debt-recovery roles, that are very good with the empathy. Clients are in a crisis, and the collectors know because they have been there: they have mismanaged their affairs, they have missed payments, so they can empathise and the customer can hear that in their voice. They have been there, and it is tough, and so you start to see that turn around. But we cannot escape the fact that those conversations around I&Es, we have tried every way to get them done digitally, and they just do not work. We have everything, like putting key figures in the background, but we just cannot make it work: a good I&E that is good for the customer, and not kicking the can down the road, will take a significant amount of time.


DP: From I&E calls I have listened to, it is clear that some customers are financially aware and know what they can afford each month, so is there a need to run them


We are starting to look at the power of digital assistance, supporting the customer to self-serve and utilise their channel of choice


through a full I&E? It would be ideal to have the flexibility of short and full I&Es depending on the customer’s circumstances. The problem is when an organisation introduces a short-form I&E, it is ensuring that it is only used in the right instances and not for those customers who would benefit from going through a full I&E, which is why the latter is often adopted as a bit of a failsafe.


When implementing changes to your collections processes, do you take into account your own customer experiences with other industries? SS: It is not just about the channels, but about what you are doing with them. I remember some years ago having a conversation about big data, and half the people did not really even know what that meant, but the conclusion was that it was what you do with it. And it is the same with digital. You can have the best digital communications possible, but if you are not looking at it in the background and analyising, looking at the engagement of that, and then disseminating what you have learnt to say ‘we sent 1,000 text messages to this cohort of customers and got a 10% open rate, but we sent the same group four days later a WhatsApp and got a 30% open rate’ then you need to be.


GM: There is an important point about control. Even in a large corporate, we realise that it is about giving control and choice back to the customer, the challenge is making those major changes in system and even culture within the business to give control back. We are starting to look at the power of digital assistance, supporting the customer to self-serve and utilise their channel of choice. We have so many customers registered to access their accounts online, but how often are we having a conversation with them to make sure that they know how to use all the tools that are available to them? Ultimately, we are finding that, underneath everything else, customers just want to feel that they are in control, and if you give them more control, then they are much more likely to engage.


CP:We have talked about various communications methods, but a key one for us is web chat. We did a piece of work with some dentists, small firms where the people doing credit control were the receptionists who had no skill-set whatsoever, but this had been put upon them. Their only recourse to ask for help from us was via web-chat, because they were very embarrassed about what they had been asked to do.


SH: If you look at employee experience and treat that in the same way you treat customer experience, then you are half way there. At Simplyhealth, we have recently introduced a new flexible reward package whereby our people can select any of the products that we sell to customers. In addition to the rich feedback that we receive from our external customers, we also have our people using our products, and the feedback is invaluable because we have every demographic range within the organisation. CCR


Left-right: Richard Fenton; Sarah Watts; Sonny Visawadia; Tom Evans; Jason Spence March 2018 www.CCRMagazine.com 35


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