In Focus Consumer Credit
Left-right: Graham Price; Jerome Heap; John Davies; John Preston; Kishan Bhatt >>
which is very much ‘if there is a problem, you must call us’. Well, what
if that is not the customer’s preference? What if your message is ‘if you are having problems then go to our website’? Because we can put a lot more information onto a website to cover off some of the issues the customer is facing. We can signpost them much better from there and we can give information that can be tailored to their scenario and give them better directions of what they need to do, when they need to contact us, and what they need to contact us with. So, from their perspective, they have a much better journey as a customer.
SD: Our view is to offer customers choice: a range of contact methods across multiple channels. Another use of engagement is to find out how well we are meeting customer’s underlying needs. It can be simple questions after transaction, or deeper sessions in focus groups. Together they feed marketing and product design, as much as customer service.
BK:We do surveys, which are useful. Two things I would question though. Firstly, as a debt-collection company, do we have the skills to optimise the wording and phrasing of surveys? Secondly, is the feedback biased? For example, if we were to talk to a customer and say ‘do not worry, pay us when you feel like it’ you would probably get very positive feedback. Plus, does a bad mark necessarily mean that it has been a bad call? It might simply be the person is being asked to pay money they do not want to pay. So it is important to go into the verbal feedback as much as the scoring.
JH:We made a policy decision that our customer-service feedback questions would
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be exactly the same as collections questions, so we could compare the two. The feedback is invaluable because you are being honest with yourself to say sometimes we do not hit the mark and sometimes we do, then we can analyse that and see what we do.
GP: I have two big questions for this kind of activity. Firstly, what is the purpose? It is designed to improve engagement, or is it supposed to be an external lens for conduct? The two are no way the same. Different approaches tend to push you toward different tools. Secondly, there is the question of all those customers that you do not speak to. I work at the back-end of the collections cycle and so we do not talk to many customers, it is a very low contact rate. So what do all those customers, who we do not speak to, think? Have they been avoiding us because they have been on the forums? Are they actually just unable to engage with the whole process, whether it is informal or formal, because of a lack of financial education, or a lack of education in general? There are so many different motivations for the customers that we do not speak to and it is difficult to find anything that specifically motivates them. I have been thinking that there is a general public perception of what we do that is quite wrong – say the words ‘debt collection’ and the public perception of that is not accurate to the reality. So we need to work on promotion and education.
How amenable to this are customers – is this changing? ER: Our customers fall into two categories. Where we engage with them quite early, they use it as a good opportunity to say ‘I am having problems and might need to have my loan extended’ and they are grateful to have a conversation they might otherwise have put off for a bit longer. The flip side is that you have people who treat you with suspicion; ‘why are you hassling me now? I am not due’. You can explain you are just getting in touch to make sure that things as going well. Trying to get the tone of the conversation right in the beginning to persuade those who are initially suspicious that it is good that the company cares and is calling them, is a challenge that we are constantly working on.
Our view is to offer customers choice: a range of contact methods across multiple channels
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JD: There are slightly different processes for different situations because you have people like ourselves who are originating the client, with processes through which we engage to bring them onboard, and then there are the agencies which have no prior relationship. Then there are the likes of the utilities which have customers by default. So the approach is somewhat different because, if you have sourced the customer, by rights you should engage with the customer thereafter, as it is human nature to pay someone that you like before someone that you do not like. Also, if you are doing a high volume of collections, your team needs to go through the whole range of that, if you do not have many, and it is a continuance of an existing relationship, you do not necessarily need specialist staff.
PT: Different markets do need different approaches because the customer needs are themselves different. In terms of whether
January 2017
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