In Focus Consumer Credit
Left-right: Peter Munro; Simon Armitage; Thomas Strang; Will Reid >>
digitally processed, when in fact that may not be entirely correct. They
clearly do not like it when any sector is, essentially, seen to be deceiving customers even though that may not be the intention at all, so it is vital that systems can keep up.
PM:We work closely with many different partners in the creditor sector and I think it is fair to say that those that are successful with new technologies are those who approach it with the customer at the heart, rather than, say, a desire to reduce cost or drive efficiencies. I think that you can drive very different behaviours with those strategies. If the approach is ‘we will introduce this to
reduce costs’, then you will tend to find that produces a very poor customer journey. Whereas those who start with an
approach of ‘there is a real demand here from customers for digital experiences which we need to meet head on’ will deliver the best journeys. Our digital journey started when 65% of
our customers said loud and clear that they do not want to talk to us – which is great for a call centre! Customer led insights like this are what drives all of our digital activity. If you get the journey right for the
customer the efficiencies soon follow – we have seen huge improvements in engagement and significant benefits from our ‘assisted self-serve’ Digital I&E that utilises credit reference agency data and Open Banking data.
The promise of analytics, machine learning, and AI is that they can turn raw data into business gold. But is the data really there in collections? PM: One thing we have learnt is that whilst customers demand the freedom to pick the channel of their choice it is very difficult to
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Our digital journey started when 65% of our customers said loud and clear that they do not want to talk to us – which is great for a call centre! Customer led insights like this are what drives all of our digital activity. If you get the journey right for the customer the efficiencies soon follow – we have seen huge improvements in engagement and significant benefits from our ‘assisted self-serve’ Digital I&E
enforce a ‘channel shift’ on them. So if your key motivation is to drive people to a ‘cheaper channel’ you may come unstuck.
JB:We also use digital for groups of customers who we do need to persuade, this is also an additional method of dialing, so we are trying to encourage them to call in to the centre or utilise the portal. Last month was a good example for us:
we doubled our month of inbound chat through that medium or voice-to-landline, so we were sending out the messages and getting the customers to call in. This ensures obviously we have right party
contact to create collection opportunities but also more critically to understand our customer needs and status.
RT: As a legal agency, these points have caused us something of a quandary
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because, as has been touched upon, the more serious an issue is, the more people tend to want to contact you. If we have taken legal action against
somebody, then they are often quite keen and it might be that they want to contact us through digital channels. For some of the reasons that we have
been talking about, we have been reluctant to fully open up to accept a repayment agreement online without human consideration, because we do not know the circumstances that have led them to that. Maybe we are half way through legal
action and we do not know how the repayment arrangement might impact that. They might be vulnerable and they might be going down that route for entirely the wrong reasons when, if we only spoke to them, then we would realise that we needed to back right off. So we have not fully resolved the issues
around that as yet. We would like to build a fully automated
repayment arrangement facility, as we feel that there are customers who would benefit from that, but we are still working on how we build enough control.
JB: Once the case has gone down the legal route, where a customer is clearly trying to avoid paying, but has net assets to cover the legal vetting process, however if they are not avoiding, but just cannot pay, then there is a high level of vulnerability risk and as a sector we have to ensure these people receive the necessary care and attention.
JS: Ask yourself, would you engage with the channels being used? Does it help you create a frictionless journey? Keep your contact strategies concise, easy to manage, simple and engaging. CCR
March 2020
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