In Focus Collections
Left-right: Andy Allan; Dougie McManus; Dan Smith; Emma Ryan; Katy Everett
How important is technology in today’s collections environment – how do you balance your technology and agents’ skills? SB:What it does is allow you to spend your time with people spending time focusing on the accounts that we need them to spend time on. The key with digitalisation is that it is just the journey; the stuff that does not involve customer contact needs to be digitalised, whereas the stuff that needs contact inevitably needs more contact. The easy job for a lender can be to contact the new customer when they want to come on board, the difficult job tends to be three or four years down the line when you have to hold their hand and help them to keep their finances in order so that they can pay you back in time. The problem is that you never had enough time to do enough hand-holding and digitalisation allows you to create that time without suddenly doubling the size of your workforce to achieve that.
NS: Customers like the anonymity of using a digital channel as an alternative to the telephone. It is quick and easy. We all have our mobile phones with us pretty much at all times. So that is what we want to do.
CP: At Zinc, I think we had something of a light-bulb moment when we realized that we needed to embrace the technology that people were using, rather than trying to force our technology onto them. So three or four years ago we started to really look at the methods by which people were choosing to communicate with us and then mirror that. That is one lesson from technology: the need to go with the flow. If you think back a few years ago, it was very much a case of ‘we will speak to you when we want
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to, and when we call you will answer the telephone even if you are in the supermarket at the time or just come home from work’. Things have completely changed now.
PN: There is always a question over whether technology drives up engagement, because the argument could be that people will engage regardless of the contact option that you give them. The same people who call are the ones who would engage with you anyway, but they will just go a technological route to do so, rather than call.
base. Because our customer base is largely under 35 and have all downloaded the app they prefer to communicate with us in that way. So, in terms of how important it is, it hugely depends on your business and what your customers want.
People can talk to us on the telephone, but that is only if they ask for it, we do not do outbound calls. What works hugely depends on your business model and on the products that you offer, and also depends on your customer base
SM: Everyone who signs up with Monzo does so by downloading an app. If they want to apply for a loan or an overdraft, then they do it through the app; so they are already digitally savvy. For us, most of our communication is digital, via the in app chat. People can talk to us on the telephone, but that is only if they ask for it, we do not do outbound calls. What works. hugely depends on your
business model and on the products that you offer, and also depends on your customer
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DS: I think that one of the benefits, which has not been touched on so far, is from a compliance perspective. So it can be easy for humans to make mistakes, but, if you get the configuration right and you have enough data integrity, then you can guarantee that you will be doing the right thing. Now, the right thing might be that you offer them the ability to call in as well, but, if everything is designed correctly, then you can guarantee that what you are doing is right from a regulatory standpoint as well.
SM:Whether you can do collections digitally depends on how much you invest in your products and the online or in-app proposition. Because you cannot do everything, for example, face-to-face or on the telephone and then suddenly try and do digital collections, your customers are just not used to communicating with you in that way, or might not be able to. Banks can do a lot more with their apps, to actually get customers to use it in the first place and only then can you really do collections through it at scale. At Monzo that is how you do pretty much
everything and the digital proposition is one of the main things people sign up for. Some firms have a large proportion of their customers who do not use online banking or download their app and that blocks them from truly doing digital collections. Some firms might also have
November 2019
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