In Focus Collections
Left-right: James O’Hare; Jannie Vermeulen; Kishan Bhatt; Marie Marsden; Mark Bryant >>
the most invasive and expensive collections approaches work quite
well, but you just cannot afford to do enough of them to make it cost effective. Then, when you have a fixed amount of resources in your business, you are effectively saying ‘well, I have not contacted as many customers’. But that is not because of the channel necessarily, because the economics of the whole scenario are very different.
VH: Regardless of whether it is B2B or B2C, you need to know your customer and to engage with them in the way that you know them. So, if it is a brick-layer who is always out on site, then maybe calling him on his mobile is the only way to get hold of him, and following that up with a letter or e-mail that he can pick up in the evening. If you are dealing with a consumer who is avoiding you, then you need to go through all those strategies. So it is about knowing and understanding that customer before you engage in lending or extending credit to them, the up-front process is key. If you are not careful, then you will push the wrong buttons with the customer by repeatedly using the wrong contact methods and, instead of paying you, they will give you the run-around for a little while longer.
MH: If you only have one string to your bow, then you will only succeed in getting in touch with certain customers, but if you have multiple strings to your bow and understand how that person expects to be contacted, then you will have more success. I remember another case in a previous role where, if you were in arrears, you could not access your account online: the system blocked your account. Nobody had ever looked at how many people in arrears had tried to log in. Of
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course, if 50% of our arrears customer are trying to log in, maybe we should not bar them, maybe we should let them self-serve.
DC: I think that the key is building intelligent systems to be able to cope with the changes, and be able to pre-empt what is going to happen next.
GP:We have two factors here: firstly the customer typology, however you choose to segment the groups, but then you have to multiply that by the stimulus that you are talking about, and often that stimulus could be nothing; we wait for the customer to come to us and then give them the access to everything they need and so we do not need to spend any money on day one of the collections cycle to make my KPIs better when they will come to me on day three. But the customer segmentation multiplied by the stimulus gives you the outcome. You cannot get the customer segment until you have done lots of trials of what works with different types of customers, and what it is that you are trying to achieve.
MHI: It is an interesting point what the customer sees when they choose to engage with us. Quite a lot of people will come onto your website to check you out, and that is a great opportunity to build trust. We use a lot of Trustpilot ratings by customers and even if we are unable to contact a customer from an outbound point of view, because
they are coming and checking us out, it is an opportunity to build trust.
DC: I think most businesses will agree that, once the customer engages, you can normally bring about a solution – so it is all about trying to get them to engage. It is not about the old way of pushing and threatening, it is about creating trust and transparency. It is a case of making them feel that, when they contact you, they are not going to have a really bad experience or be pushed to do something they cannot do. I think, in collections that is the biggest fear for the customer. For me it is all about what drives engagement, and if it is being friendly, then that is what you should do. You want them to engage with you when things fall over.
VH: It is sometimes easier to collect money from someone with a smile, because they can hear that smile down the telephone and they will engage with you, rather than being the Rottweiler of days gone by, chomping down the telephone. We know ourselves, that if someone does that to us, then it is fight or flight, we will just put a wall up against it. But if someone comes at you quite nice, smiley, and positive, then you interact with them in that same manner and then go away having had a great experience and so will come back.
It is an interesting point what the customer sees when they choose to engage with us
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Has self-serve now become a standard practice in the industry? MW: Yes, I think businesses are looking to offer this facility and it is a good customer journey if they simply do not want to talk to an agent on the telephone. A customer may feel more comfortable completing their I&E and making an offer online. I would find it quite hard to complete a telephone
December 2017
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