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In Focus Consumer Credit Valuing your engagement


Truly engaging with customers is the first, crucial step in the journey to achieving a suitable outcome. So, last month, CCRMagazine and Ascent Performance Group brought together a panel of experts to debate the subject. They were Graham Price, director of external collections, Lowell Group (GP); Jerome Heap, litigation and commercial collections manager, Southern Water (JH); Mike O'Reilly, collections risk manager, EE (MO); Bob Kingdon, director of compliance, 1st Credit (BK); John Davies, chief executive, The Just Loans Group (JD); Andrew Jackson, head of collections & recoveries, Funding Circle (AJ); Emma Ryan, head of redemptions, Amicus (ER); Paul Stretton, head of debt & credit, Extra Energy; John Preston, head of billing, collections and revenue assurance, Tesco Mobile (JP); Kishan Bhatt, relationship manager, Opus Energy; Marie Moffatt, head of collections and recoveries, Zopa; Steve Dukes, chief product development officer, Dollar UK (SD); George Psonis, chief operating officer, Oakam (GPS); Peter Telford, director new markets and managing director, Capita Debt Services (PT); Victoria Herd, founder, Beyond Funding; Glen Walker, chief compliance officer, Ascent Performance Group (GW); and Mark Higgins, chairman, Ascent Performance Group (MH)


How are you working to improve the ways you engage with customers? BK:We have recently introduced a self-serve portal. This lets customers complete their income-and-affordability (I&E) data for us to view and to make a repayment offer online. By removing the direct conversation we hope people in debt, for example those worried, or scared to call a creditor, will communicate via this method. This is still quite new, but we are finding people who have not contacted us in three of four years have gone online, loaded up an I&E, and made an offer!


ER: Our approach is to encourage early engagement with our end customers, and to make sure the agents understand fully what property has been lent on and all relevant details of the client transaction at the outset. This hands-on, personal approach is very much at the heart of how we do things; by sharing information and making sure all parties are armed with the facts from the start, we are in a better position to talk to the client about the progress of their loan.


PT: From a debt perspective we start the customer engagement from the point of acquisition or origination to the ensure customer journey is overlaid by debt prevention from the outset. We use credit- risk analytics to see if the right payment plan has been adopted from the point of acquisition or origination and recognise that a number of payment plans fall apart at the first bill, causing disputes and people falling into arrears. So we try to understand what has gone wrong at this point. Was it because the customer did not understand the product? Was it because they did not understand the payment plan? Was the welcome pack in ‘plain English’? So these


debt-prevention activities are a constituent part of the customer journey even before we get into debt collection. Once we do get into collections, we consider a number of customer-engagement-type activities like ‘nudge’ techniques in the way we write SMS messages, for example, to see what types of communications are appropriate to a given customer segment.


We use credit-risk analytics to see if the right payment plan has been adopted from the point of acquisition or origination


MH:We are on the journey to build a customer self-serve website. We think that has definitely got a big part to play in the future, particularly as the data-protection rules are changing. At the other end of the scale, we have a field team of 40 people who go to see small-business owners or consumers at their place of work or their homes. We also offer everything in between. So our view is very much a need for an ‘omni-channel approach’ to give the customer the options.


GW: Particularly with regards to debt collection, there has been a lot of standard scripting for many years,


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Left-right: Andrew Jackson; Bob Kingdon; Emma Ryan; George Psonis; Glen Walker January 2017 www.CCRMagazine.co.uk 19


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