Customer volume in collections is growing at an alarming rate. Whether it’s from credit plans or the increasing pressure from the rising cost of living, there are more people facing financial difficulties that need support.
As a collections business, it's your responsibility to help each of these customers reach financial stability, no matter how many of them there are. In this article, we go over how to continuously improve your productivity so that you can increase resolution rates to match the growing customer volume.
The challenge of productivity in the modern collections landscape
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, US credit card debt has exceeded $1 trillion. More and more accounts are becoming delinquent and entering collections, significantly increasing the volume of customers. For you, this means a greater strain on your operations and a greater need for optimisation.
You need to parallel the growth of customers with continuously increasing your productivity. Without it, you risk customers waiting too long for solutions and feeling isolated in their delinquency. You want to minimize response time and maximize customer care so that they stay with you rather than moving elsewhere; this can only be achieved by enhancing your productivity from end-to-end.
Solutions to continuously improve productivity
Automate manual tasks
As your customer volume increases, so does the number of manual tasks for your team. Data entry, sending out SMS/email reminders and performing analytics to create resolution strategies. These are all tasks that take away valuable face time with your customers.
Arduous and manual tasks can be enhanced with the use of AI and automation. Instead of manually doing simple tasks, automation can do faster, better and more reliably. Not only does this boost productivity and improve your customer experience, but effectively eliminates the risk of the all-too-often human error!
Provide self-service opportunities
Customer contact, service and support is an integral part of collections. You need to be available for customers on the phone that need it, but what about those that don’t like phone calls? A large number of delinquent customers are in uncomfortable situations, and the last thing they want is to be on the phone with your team.
Self-service opportunities is a productive solution that kills two birds with one stone. For customers that don’t respond to phone calls, it allows them to resolve their own debt via a dedicated portal or chat bot. For customers who do respond to phone calls, your team has more available time to dedicate to supporting them. All in all, self-service enhances productivity with all of your customers.
Utilize a data-driven platform
One of the most time consuming and important aspects of collections is creating strategies and solutions to help individual customers reach financial stability. The nucleus of your productivity should be focused on this aspect, as it is the reason your customers engage with you and not another business.
By utilizing a data-driven platform, you can both enhance the quality of your strategies for each customer and greatly enhance productivity. These platforms can be configured by your team and act on a set of smart rules to distinguish the right solutions for your customers. They perform this automatically, all you need to do is give it the right data and it will give you the right solutions. This greatly boosts productivity to let you scale and manage a large volume of customers in a humanized way.
Enhance productivity with Debt Manager
More customers are entering collections than ever before. To adapt to this, you need to actively enhance your operations and productivity so that every new customer gets the same, high level of service.
C&R Software’s industry leading Debt Manager incorporates automation, self-service features and data-driven processes into a single end-to-end platform. It makes it easier for your team to manage customers and provide solutions, and actively enhances productivity at every step of collections.
To find out more about Debt Manager and how it can enhance the productivity of your operations, contact a member of our team today.
