In Focus Collections
Left-right: Andrew Burman; Andy Rose; Emma Watson; George Badejo; Liam Hills
What are the most effective methods of customer engagement today? TA: I think it will always come back to basic communication. Obviously that is not only about picking the telephone up, but I still think that is one of the best instruments we can use. I feel that the art of conversation has become less frequent in society, but you also have to recognise that the nature of business is truly 24/7 and global. So we have to remember how to communicate and make sure that we are practicing that art on the telephone, by e-mail, messager, or whatever. I think that people sometimes lack the confidence of speak so they hide behind the technology, but, for me, an e-mail is used to confirm something that has already been agreed. E-mail is a very powerful tool, but also very emotive.
NSF: I do think that, to an extent, we are losing the art of communication because everything goes through the mobile phone.
PH: Good credit professionals are not just born that way, you need to teach them the skills. There is an interesting project that Hitachi has been running over the past 18 months in terms of how we communicate with customers. I have been working with our other Divisions and they have some very interesting initiatives. One, they call ‘people and technical’, aiming to get a balance. When speaking with a customer, you have your people skills, which enable you to communicate effectively, but you have technical knowledge. If you are really friendly, but that customer just wants their problem to be sorted out, you may have great rapport, but the customer’s problem is not solved – you need more. Conversely, if your technical knowledge is great, you can
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simply feature dump the technical details, but the customer is not listening because you have not built any rapport. The training is focused on bringing both of these skills up.
NSF: I am still from the school of thought that a credit controller is born. The nuances of a credit controller, with regards to the specifics, we can teach them certain things to do with communications and tools, but I think that a credit controller is a very specific type of person.
KM: It is a question of what are the skills needed to be a good collector. I will start with one: understanding that you have two ears and one mouth and using those in proportion.
I think that people sometimes lack the confidence of speak so they hide behind the technology, but, for me, an e-mail is used to confirm something that has already been agreed. E-mail is a very powerful tool, but also very emotive
GB: I tend to say to people that anybody can be a credit controller. I started as a credit controller myself, and the question is: if you borrow money from a friend of yours, how would you approach collecting that money? What types of questions would you ask? I appreciate that there is both science and art to collections, but I think that the majority of us are actually capable of doing collections work if we treat the money that we are collecting as our own, so that we ask the right questions and challenge appropriately.
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MP:When I started in business, it was as a finance rep, meaning that you would go around trying to get finance business in during the day, and in the evening you are knocking on doors trying to collect money. When you are knocking on doors in places like Chalk Hill estate in Wembley, and also repossessing cars, them you soon learn the art of communication. You learn what you should say to someone and what you should not say when you are trying to get money, because when you see these people face-to-face, there is no remoteness of the telephone. You have to, almost instantly, be able to build up a rapport.
Do you have the data available to properly profile your customers? LH: From a staffing perspective, it is a strange situation for lenders as contact centres are generally understaffed during the first week of the month and overstaffed for the other two weeks. This is due to the main pay dates falling within the last two weeks of the month. Therefore, I always find my last and first working weeks hectic. It is interesting hearing the different challenges faced by the different sectors. Our experience is somewhat different in that we have found most of our customers are not keen engaging with us over the telephone. This is no doubt due to the fact, most of them were onboarded online therefore likely to prefer a similar method of engagement post sale. It is an interesting transitional period for us moving from
March 2020
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