The Analysis News & Opinions
‘Choose journey strategies carefully’
Collectors must be careful to understand the best engagement tools, including litigation, for their customers in arrears, according to a senior industry professional. Speaking at a round-table debate run by
CCRMagazine in association with Moriarty Law, Peter Munro, partnerships director of PayPlan, said: “I think, in all this, there is no obvious ‘silver bullet’. People tend to agonise over ‘if I only do this one thing, it will crack it’, but I think you just have to be brave and continuously test and learn, using different combinations of channels and messages which all need to be underpinned by investment in agent training and development.” Kristjan Novitski, chief executive at Cash
On Go, agreed: “For a lender, when a customer falls into arrears, it means that we have already done something wrong, and maybe should not have issued the loan in the first place. But, unfortunately, things like this still do happen. How many of us use machine-learning in the back-end to consider your strategy for a customer who has fallen into arrears? This is what we do: we choose the best path for these customers according to the past behaviour of the same types of customers. “We have several different strategies
accordingly: for one, you do not want to call them, but you want to send them reminders and offer them discounts, because we know that this would work best; for others, you do not need to do anything other than make the information available and they will pay when they have the money; and then for the third group, they will not repay regardless of what we do, so you might go for litigation because collections is not going to work for them.” Richard Wilson, group chief credit officer
of OneSavings Bank, said: “It can very much depend on the type of your lending. For example, if you are a first-charge mortgage lender, there is advice up-front (for certain products), but when a customer falls into arrears, the core contact regulation is relatively prescriptive about the way that
July 2017 Opinion
Struggling SMEs call for a return to Europe
Nearly a third of SMEs (31%) want a new government that would reverse the Brexit decision, according to our research. The survey asked more than 1,000 owners and directors of SMEs nationwide which policies a new government could enact to help their businesses grow. In Wales, which voted by 53% on 23 June
you need to follow that process through. That process might be prescriptive but the engagement path is still crucial, so you need as many different avenues into your business to pay as you can.” Stuart Knock, chief executive of EOS
Solutions UK, asked: “It is interesting to hear if any of the lenders let their DCAs know the information that they hold in terms of what types of communication have, or have not worked with a particular customer in the past, because we are often acting completely blind. Maybe the creditor has established that the customer prefers e-mail or might self-serve, but when it gets to us, we see none of that.” Meanwhile, Carlos Osorio, director of
UK debt recovery at TDX, said: “The key is to know your customer. We talk about KYC at acquisition, from a regulatory standpoint, money-laundering and the like, and yet it is a constant surprise to me how little creditors appear to know about their customers in arrears. How can you do the right thing for a customer you know so little about? The challenge for all industry participants is to make more effort to understand the customer even before trying to get in contact with them – that is the key to better customer engagement. “In the data-rich world we now live in,
where we now expect organisations to know nearly everything about us, is it not fair for customers to be a bit disappointed if we do not know, and act on, information we should reasonably already know?”
www.CCRMagazine.co.uk
to leave the European Union, this figure rose to 36% – the highest outside of London, where 41% of SMEs would reverse the decision on Brexit. The proportion in Scotland was also high (36%), but their top priority from the list of options was a clear and final position on Scottish independence – an issue for 49% of business owners. The results showed a correlation between
the desire to reverse the Brexit decision and a business’ outlook for the next three months. In total, 45% of SMEs predicting decline or struggling to survive said they wanted a government that would reverse the Brexit decision compared with 27% predicting growth. This reflects our previous research at the beginning of the year which found that 61% of SMEs expecting decline said there were no opportunities for their business as a result of the UK leaving the EU, compared with 33% predicting growth. Among the various sectors, 48% of those
in the agriculture industry were keen to see a government that was committed to negotiating favourable trade deals beyond the EU – far higher than the average figure across all sectors of 24%. Amongst the manufacturing sector, this figure was 37%. While Brexit prompted strong opinions
amongst survey respondents, the key demands from SMEs were a reduction of red tape (40%) and lower taxes (35%). Indeed, red tape reduction was a top-three wish for every sector, peaking in the agriculture sector.
Gavin Wraith-Carter Managing director, Hitachi Capital Business Finance
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