In Focus Risk
>> Left-right: Matthew Mitchell; Sally Nolan; Tony Lawrence; Val De Melo Koch
AD: If you do still get calls, then it can actually be very helpful because,
if you find that you are getting a lot of calls raising a particular dispute or query, then that can be something that you can forestall, either as part of a standard strategy or, perhaps, a bespoke strategy for that client or that group of clients. We have one example where we have a
lot of clients in a particular industry sector and we have tailored the standard letter to go out and to preemptively raise and answer some common queries that we know would otherwise get. This, again, has considerably reduced the number of calls and queries, and increased the likelihood that people will just pay when they get the letter.
What are the big challenges and opportunities in this changing world of collections? AD:We are seeing this with some of our larger clients: they have their own processes, their own portals. They are usually third- party portals that they have bought from their vendor, or it has come as part of their company system. They are all different from each other and they are all incompatible, so that an invoice that you tailor for one customer’s portal will not be accepted by another. It is actually meaning that we are going
backwards: we are going away from a situation where you have a neat automated process to generate invoices and send them out. You are having to basically implement a bespoke process for each client, and for one or two clients it can even be a manual process. We went fully electronic with e-billing
years ago, and we have examples where we still have to manually edit the PDF and send it to companies every month, because it is the only way to get their billing portal
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to work, because they want a particular wording in a particular place, or something like that. Portals can be an example of a good technological idea that is implemented so poorly that it is actually going to be counter-productive.
HDN: One of the things that we have found when we have put together our product is that the B2B and B2C environments are very different in terms of what you expect to see. So we think that it is so important to try to move that experience, which we are all so used to when we go online or into a shop as a private consumer, and enhance that into the B2B world.
AB: So very much you need an automated system to say ‘now is the time to send the letter’ manually.
JD: In our business, one thing that we have been working on for sometime has been psychographic profiling – that is studying how you behave. We have adopted a number of things, for example, that our customers have to pay by direct debit, you can now do variable direct debits every week, and those who do not want to go down that route, will raise a question of why
not. Then we introduced a facility that would allow us to see when people have opened all communications from us, so we send them an invoice and we can see exactly when they have opened it. They will only use that as an excuse once ‘oh, I did not see the invoice’, ‘well, yes you did, you saw it a 4.10 on Thursday’! We have also then used that for engagement thereafter, so by giving each customer an account manager, we have been able to give them hints and tips on communicating with them. So we looked at how many times they
interacted back with us: so those that opened the message, read it, and interacted back with us were engaged, and the others were clearly not engaged and so we could move those customers to another category where we could try to find out why they are not engaged because we know from experience that if they are not engaged, then they are more likely to go into a bad debt position or leave as a customer. The next piece was the use of Open
Banking, so that we have access to their bank account periodically, and from there we have technology which will assess what is going on in their account, for example if it sees round-number payments then it can mean there is a payment arrangement, because rarely is an invoice a round number. We have also built fraud-prevention service
We have adopted a number of things, for example, that our customers have to pay by direct debit, you can now do variable direct debits every week, and those who do not want to go down that route, will raise a question of why not
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facility which every night looks at whether any of these people are potentially connected to fraud and what has changed that would cause us concern, so you are watching things on a continuous live basis. And all of this can only be accomplished with the use of tech powered by augmented intelligence. We strongly believe that the deeper
understanding of behavioural types is a key to unlocking good customers and ejecting those that are likely to cause harm. CCR
March 2020
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