In Focus Consumer Credit


Left-right: Perry Burns; Peter Wallwork; Richard Haymes; Richard Kernick; Richard Koch >>


DS:Where should a collections business’s functions focus? I believe


the focus has to be around improving the digital and self-serve capability because technology is driving customer experience and the way in which customers want to interact with firms is rapidly changing.


What will be the impact of the digital revolution on the industry? BC: It is a question of that waterfall of understanding: there is a cohort of customers that just want to ‘press 1 to pay’, they want that simplicity, and you can do that on a bus without exposing what you are doing. There is a cohort who consider that a chat is a conversation, they do not want to go to voice even if it is voice with an AI bot, they do not want to have a call. And then you have people who, whether it


is by chat or voice, they want to know that somebody has heard and listened to them, and they are getting the empathy back in a voice tone. I know a bank that has taken 240 people


off their 260-seater dialer without impairment uplift after six months. I know another institution that decommissioned its on-site dialer in favor of call fronting.


JP:We visited a number of DCAs last week and everybody wanted to look at some form of digital approach, but some were very gradual in how they were getting there, and others were all over it – it was the next


thing that they definitely wanted to do. So you do get a variance between companies in terms of how they adopt it. From our perspective, when we are doing


collections, we have the amount that people owe, and we – like all our competitors – do a settlement figure. Most of our competitors will say that they will knock off a percentage, we do not do that, we calculate a specific


not using the second figure very much’, and they will say ‘we can only get one figure in our letters’ because of our letter technology. So, whilst the data technology and


innovation is there, the change to implement this in the customer journey is often more difficult.


Where should a collections business’s functions focus? I believe the focus has to be around improving the digital and self-serve capability because technology is driving customer experience and the way in which customers want to interact with firms is rapidly changing


settlement amount for each customer because we feel that this is treating our customers fairly in line with the FCA’s rules. For example, we might just be looking to recover the remaining value of the handset. We send the settlement figures to the


DCAs in a separate field. Then, when we go around to the DCAs, we say ‘you are


RB:We have used live chat a lot for the initial sales and marketing, and customer- support area, but once we move to the collections arena, and before passing out to DCAs, we veered away from it for fear of causing problems, for example in terms of data protection. So I am interested and pleased to hear that other suppliers, as well as DCAs, are saying it is more on the plus side than an issue. However, I would need to be fully


convinced before altering our current policy and look to see and hear more on how this method is approached by those currently using it. I am particularly intrigued to see and have explained how this operates from an audit perspective and in ensuring that forbearance, vulnerability, and TCF obligations are adhered to.


NC: The next incarnation of that is really to automate all of it. That is your machine learning – that is where you take all your content and decide that you can plot all the customer journeys and just have AI answering it. So the experienced agent is there as support. CCR


The Revolution is here. 24 www.CCRMagazine.com May 2018


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