In Focus Collections
options to take full or partial payments, get working on that immediately! The question you need to ask yourself is: how easy are we making it for our customers to make a payment in a way, and via a channel, that those customers prefer?
Continued frustration We have seen instances, with clients that introduce a new communication channel, where it does positively impact customer engagement, but can also lead to frustration. A good example is where we implemented SMS-conversation campaigns between the contact-centre agents and customers. It worked well, with 50% of customers,
who previously the client had failed to make contact with, engaging over this new two-way SMS channel. In an effort to identify which elements of the conversation could be automated using our AI engine, an anomaly jumped out at us. A ‘request to make a payment’ featured in only 32.4% of all customer conversations. Taking payments was only carried out by
agents over a telephone call or an online payment portal. This need to break out from one channel to another, not only generated
December 2017
being squeezed, this type of reduction could be the difference between a profit or loss for the whole operation. Technology should not be a hindrance, it
The question you need to ask yourself is: how easy are we making it for our customers to make a payment in a way, and in a channel, that those customers prefer?
customer frustration, but also resulted in significant collections leakage. The fix of adding payments as part of the
overall SMS or Messenger conversation flow had an immediate impact, with overall collections up by 2.3% and currently this channel accounts for 22% of all collections, impressive when you consider it did not exist 18 months ago. The other business benefit of introducing
SMS Conversations was that the average cost for every pound collected reduced by over 19% and, in today’s super-competitive collections environment, where margins are
www.CCRMagazine.co.uk
should be an enabler, and adding additional payment channels to existing operations is easier today than it has ever been. It does not need to be the next big IT project that is scheduled for early 2019 launch. The above example of adding payments into a SMS and Messenger conversations channel only took six days from start to finish. Most modern technologies are designed
with an API-first approach. This turns these previously long timeframe integrations into a small piece of work completed in a few days, requiring minimal IT resource. So, what is next? Prioritising plans for
non-telephone call customer conversational, collections and payments engagement. This is not going to take over from telephone calls in next 12 to 18 months – there is probably very little more optimisation you can do with your call activity anyway – but companies that are ignoring the channels that customers are having their conversations in, will result in the business losing valuable monies from collections performance. CCR
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