The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that total household debt in the US has risen to $17.06 trillion, with credit playing a significant role in contributing $45 billion between Q1 and Q2 of 2023.
More credit equals more customers facing delinquency, and more customers facing delinquency for the first time. This can be a frightening experience, which is why organizations need to demonstrate care and empathy to not only make collections, but to keep customers loyal.
In this article, we explore how you can best deal with unresponsive customers, engage them, make collections, and retain them as happy customers.
The first step in supporting a customer through collections is understanding their situation through decisioning. How many times have they missed a payment? Do they have a history of delinquency? Have they responded to you in the past? To answer these questions, you need a solid foundation of information to formulate a strategy.
Centralizing data into a Single Source of Truth (SSoT) makes creating this foundation a simple and efficient process. You can record all the necessary customer data into one place, and then retrieve it from the same place when you need it. Integrating a SSoT makes the lives of your team easier, so that your customers can have an easier time through collections.
Unresponsive customers, as their name suggests, can be challenging to support through their lack of engagement. After all, how are you supposed to provide them with the help they need if they don’t reply? Because of this, you need to let them choose how they engage with you, otherwise the relationship will probably stay pretty silent.
Providing omnichannel communications with an equal level of support and response time across each channel is vital in managing unresponsive customers. You need to let them choose when and where to communicate with you, and then be there when they need it. That way, you can provide the right payment plans, offers and support to somewhere they are likely to look at, which is a step towards debt resolution.
Oftentimes, unresponsive customers are the result of a complicated situation, and feel embarrassed by being delinquent. It’s not people who are purposely ignoring you, it’s people that are in a challenging situation and feel intimidated by collections businesses contacting them.
With the help of a configurable platform, you can humanize your collections process to make these customers feel more at ease with their situation. This can range from supporting chat bot capabilities to let them self-resolve, to using audio analytics to detect emotional vulnerabilities that would otherwise be difficult to detect. Whatever the solution is for the customer, a configurable platform can help you support each to guide them to financial health.
Collections businesses are facing more customers than ever before, which directly results in more customers facing frightening and uncomfortable situations. To help these customers resolve their debt, you should transition to a configurable platform that houses a SSoT, omnichannel communications and self-service opportunities.
C&R Software’s industry leading Debt Manager showcases complete configurability and seamless integration with a range of systems. By transitioning, you can be better equipped to help your customers with humanized processes to scale with the influx of customers and grow into the future.
To find out more about Debt Manager and how it can help you manage unresponsive customers, contact a member of our team today.