In Focus Collections The future of litigation


Last month, CCRMagazine and Moriarty Law brought together an industry panel to debate the prospects for litigation. They were: Gary Jones, director, collections services, HSBC; John Preston, head of billing, collections and revenue assurance, Tesco Mobile (JP); Scott Stevenson, head of credit operations, Neyber; Raj Gill, collections manager, Spark Energy; Russell Barrett, senior collections manager, Ezbob (RB); Carlos Osorio, director of UK debt recovery, TDX (CO); Marie Moffatt, head of collections & recoveries, Zopa (MM); Ian Simpson, DCA control and strategy manager, NewDay; Steve Dukes, chief product development officer, Dollar Financial UK; Stuart Knock, chief executive, EOS Solutions UK (SK); Peter Munro, partnerships director, PayPlan (PM); Richard Wilson, group chief credit officer, OneSavings Bank (RW); Kristjan Novitski, chief executive, Cash On Go (KN); Jackie Borthwick, European credit manager, ABS Europe (JB); Mark Bryant, director, SLL Capital; Frank Hanafin, director of commercial services, Moriarty Law (FH); and Matt Subert, director of sales, Moriarty Law (MS)


How can you improve customer engagement in today’s collections environment? PM: Traditionally, as a free debt-advice provider, we have relied on the industry to encourage customers to speak to us on the telephone, despite debt problems often being a subject people do not want to talk about. Recently, we have been asking customers how they would prefer to engage with us, and 63% choose e-mail, which has triggered us to invest in an end-to-end digital customer journey. We have developed an ‘assisted self-serve’ online tool where they can log in to complete a financial statement using downloaded data from their credit report, helping to improve the accuracy of information we gather and speed up the time to complete for the customer. We can interact throughout this process using live- chat to really help those customers who want to be served through that channel. I think one of the challenges of going down the digital route is getting compliance to go on that journey with you. Nerves can jangle when talking about things like e-mail, text, self-serve, and live chat, so it is very important


end of the telephone. Most of our customers are digitally driven and most of the activity people do on their mobile phones now.


This transformation is now also changing the ways in which creditors refer customers to us, with some now sending out simple text-message campaigns with ‘click here’ options


to get them on that journey with you.The initial reaction to using the assist self-serve route has been very good – we send people out a link to start the journey and about 78% complete it; so there is a real customer commitment to complete the process.


MM: I think with the self-serve, digital approach, people are comfortable that they can approach things in a non-confrontational way and in their own time, with no fear of being pressured by someone on the other


PM: The next part of our development is an app whereby they can send us documents such as bank statements, they can electronically sign letters of authority, they can manage payments and even complete their annual review – all via their smartphone. The full digital piece has really transformed our service – strategies were all focussed on ‘talk to us on the phone even if you do not really want to’, but now focus is on serving the customer via their preferred channel, which is driving much better engagement and outcomes. This transformation is now also changing


the ways in which creditors refer customers to us, with some now sending out simple text-message campaigns with ‘click here’ options to help their customers start a digital debt advice journey with us.


JB: Customer engagement is certainly better with a good credit-management system. I have been at my present


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Left-right: Frank Hanafin; Ian Simpson; Jackie Borthwick; John Preston; Kristjan Novitski July 2017 www.CCRMagazine.co.uk 35


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