Improved collection experiences directly lead to an increased likelihood of resolved debt. Not only are your customers more likely to engage with you again after they become current, but you’ll be better informed to develop personalized solutions through the increase of available data. Simply put, a better collections experience translates to a better collections performance.
The initial stage of any customer relationship is ensuring a stable level of engagement. You want to engage with the customer to understand how to help them in their situation, and ideally they’ll want to engage with you to get the help they need. Providing a freedom of engagement ensures this mutual understanding by putting control in the hands of the customer. This can be provided by supporting omnichannel communications, offering chat bot services and/or being available on the phone when needed. Whatever channel your customers prefer, offering them a stable, reliable, and receptive option will directly improve their collections experience and increase the likelihood of engagement.
An extension of providing customers with freedom of engagement is through supporting self-service opportunities. These are interactions that shift a greater level of control into the customer’s hands by allowing them to resolve their own debt. Self-service opportunities utilize a configurable collections platform that can interpret language and present personalized offers using data. Once a customer engages with the self-serve tool it can automatically provide offers based on their situation, allowing them to fully self cure and freeing up valuable time for your team. Two common examples of self-service options are an automated chatbot and a customer portal.
As your business grows, you need to ensure each new customer receives the same high-level of service. This can be challenging due to the scale of data management and analysis required to provide individual customers with the guidance they need. Data-driven processes remove the manual aspect of data analysis by utilizing AI to automate and determine treatment paths for each customer. This directly removes arduous tasks from your team to focus more on high-risk accounts, while simultaneously improving the customer experience with individualized debt solutions.
Personalization is one key component to a successful collections process. No one person is the same as another, so this should be reflected in their collections journey. By utilizing a configurable platform that records the micro-interactions and engagement of each customer, you inform future interactions to be personalized to their situation and stage. An example of this is configurable communications with customers that adapts the tone and channel depending on their situation and stage in collections.
All of the above processes and features have a unified benefit that goes beyond that of improving the customer experience; they also actively save time for your team via automation and optimization. This comes full circle, as the available resources of your team can be reinvested into improving the level of customer service. For customers that only respond to direct interactions with your team, this improved level of service will better support and guide them to financial health.
There are clear benefits to improving the experience of your customers through the collections process. By providing personalization and self-service opportunities, utilizing data-driven processes and improving customer service, you can efficiently hit KPIs and humanize the overall experience.
By adopting a configurable collections platform, you can seamlessly integrate the systems and processes to improve each aspect of your customer’s journey. C&R’s industry leading Debt Manager fulfills this role by supporting a range of AI-tools into one configurable place, without the need for technical specialists.
To learn more about the capabilities of Debt Manager and how it can improve your customer experience, contact a member of our team today.