Go BackUsing strategic list management to maximise collections
Many consumers and businesses today face a precarious balancing act between covering basic living/operating costs and paying debts, especially as they know that when unforeseen circumstances occur, those carefully laid plans can be thrown completely out of kilter, leading to debts spiralling out of control.
For contact centre managers entrusted with maximising the efficiency and effectiveness of a collections contact centre, this represents an ongoing challenge. In order to maximise efficiency and effectiveness, they must devise strategies and structure payment arrangements that focus not only on collecting monies owed but also on the individual circumstances of debtors - taking into account who owes what, as well as their propensity to pay, both now and in the future.
Effectively calculating the likelihood of repayment requires managers to employ a host of indicators from credit bureau scores to risk scoring models, information captured from past customer interactions and environmental variables that may cause a person to stop paying. Knowing that a person lives in an area recently hit by a natural disaster, or knowing that a person is consistently 90 days late, for example, can be key business intelligence that provides insight into what is likely to happen next, helping creditors better assess and manage overall risks.
When it comes to gauging business process efficiency, metrics such as talk times, after-call work or wrap times, penetration rates, and monies collected per hour can be invaluable. Gauging the effectiveness of the collections process, on the other hand, can be a lot more difficult.
Effectiveness is all about managing the metrics of the collections centre in the context of overall business and financial goals. And as the collections process evolves, more and better effectiveness measures are being brought to bear, including promise-to-pay kept percentages, roll rates and cure rates.
List management strategies, aided by use of the right tools and technologies, can play a vital role in delivering effective operations by ensuring that accounts representing the highest risk to the collections process are targeted with the right collections treatment. Five factors are crucial in delivering successful modern list management strategies:
1. Compliance with key business goals: Collections strategies must take into account key business goals such as greater agility, increased productivity, more streamlined processes, lower operational costs, business continuity, compliance with legislation, security, customer-specific business goals, and so on.
2. Flexibility: List management strategies should use techniques to automatically change workload assignments based on contact list quality, risk, and probability of contact. When determining the best contact times for a given level of staff and other resources, they should also have the built-in flexibility to make dynamic changes based on triggers, such as time of day, calling list penetration rate, hit rates, risk assignments, and agent resource availability.
3. An holistic view: Given that collections groups often operate from multiple locations, modern strategies must deliver a holistic view of operations in order to sharpen competitive edge, promote best practices, drive efficiency gains, and achieve profitability goals throughout the enterprise.
4. Centralised control: The ability to develop, execute, and manage enterprise-wide contact strategies from a single source in real time is another increasingly important factor. This will eliminate intra-company collection silos and resolves many of the technical issues surrounding disparate contact centres with multiple technologies and collection approaches.
5. Segmenting debtors according to risk level: In centres with large volumes of early-stage account records, low-risk or infrequent debtors who may simply need a payment reminder as a result of losing an account statement, or because of an oversight, must be identified and handled appropriately (e.g. they may require no more than a reminder notice or an outbound call scripted with a voice self-service system to capture payment information). This will help automate early-stage collection efforts as well as free up collections agents to work on 'riskier' accounts.
It's an approach with its roots in strategic business process management. Risk management techniques will identify which customers are more likely to make payments or set up payment arrangements; while the ability to dynamically change account and list segmentation in real time, to adapt to trends and patterns within specific list sectors, and to react to environmental factors that may impact contact rates within specific lists (e.g., weather events, regional contact patterns) will ensure that customer contact strategies are more effective.
Author is Isabel Montesdeoca, Senior Director of Marketing, Europe and Africa, Aspect Software marketing.uk@aspect.com Tel: 020 8589 1000
