In Focus Risk
Opportunities of technology
Last month, CCRMagazine and Data Interconnect brought together a group of senior industry professionals to consider how technology is playing an integral part in their order-to-cash activities. They were: Nick King, director, credit management and collections, Europe region, Agility (NK); John Davies, chief executive officer, The Just Loans Group (JD); Harry Dodd-Noble, head of product, Data Interconnect (HDN); Andy Bass, head of new business development, Data Interconnect (AB); Kevin Bilton, group credit manager, Inchcape Retail; Martin Parr (MP); Atul Vadher, credit management consultant and former international credit manager (AV); Matthew Mitchell, credit control and sales ledger manager, Avara Foods (MM); Gail Armstrong, head of I2C, Siemens PLC (GA); Sally Nolan, business development director – civil and business, Marston (Holdings); Val de Melo Koch, credit manager and sales ledger manager, Capita Group; Martin Arnall, GPO order-to-cash, Capita Group; Andrew Dancy, IT director, Lovetts (AD); Tor Bowen, senior consultant, Invigors EMEA; Tony Lawrence; John Burke, business process lead, National Grid; Laura Yeoman, marketing manager, Data Interconnect
If a black box has made a decision about you, if an AI has scored your credit profile, then you now have a legal right to ask and be told how that decision was taken. With a lot of AI systems, of course, the
answer is going to come back from the company that ‘we do not know, we just plugged this information into the black box and it came up with a score’. This is now a much wider consumer right and it is not just to challenge a decision: you have a right to ask how a decision was made.
GA: Previously, we would try to match up the collectors with the customer type, now we are able to cross-train and ledger share so that we are even more flexible than we were in the past.
What reliance would you place on your technology partner to help with your collections strategy? MP: There can be many meanings really, from sending out letters to automatic payment mechanisms, so that when you
have the customer on the telephone and they say that they will pay you, then you can just flip them through to the payment system. So in the time that they are paying that, the collector can be on to the next customer to talk to them.
HDN: One the customer-service side, when you are collecting, do you often find that the customer requires you to have all the information right away to, for example, solve a dispute? It is a problem of having that information available?
MM:We are taking a lot more time in how we onboard new customers as, of course, at the inception stage, you can discover a lot about people. We have realised slowing that initial process down has helped collections. You have to follow the details: sometimes
you will get businesses which require information to be supplied in certain ways, then, down the line, if you do not do that, then you will wonder why you have not been paid.
You have to be agile if you want better
collections later on, and this is not easy, but it is worthwhile. It can be very obvious: if someone tells you ‘I do not have e-mail, it has to be paper’, then you have to abide by that.
AD: From the perspective of an agency, we tend to have less information because we only have what our customers give us. But it is the same point: if we have been given more information by our clients, then often it makes that collections process easier. It also helps you to shortcut trivial disputes. The most common dispute is probably ‘I have not seen a copy of the invoice, so we now strongly encourage our clients, when they book the case with us, to give us at min- imum the invoice information. Because with the first letter we send out,
we can then say ‘and here is a copy of the invoice’, and that immediately forestalls that argument that ‘oh, I have not receive it’, or ‘oh, can you just send me this information’.
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Left-right: Gail Armstrong; John Burke; Kevin Bilton; Martin Parr March 2020
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