The UK’s Consumer Duty guidelines has established a standard of customer centricity for financial services. The goal of this humanized approach is more than just compliance, and more to build stronger relationships between businesses and their customers.
Where does self-service fall within the requirements of Consumer Duty?
One of the four main requirements of Consumer Duty is providing a high-quality and consistent level of service for customers. This requirement spans the entirety of the customer journey, calling on firms to provide an effective level of support, high quality of engagement and complete transparency.
For the collections process, the quality of support and engagement can differ between customers; some may see regular and direct contact as supportive and beneficial, whereas others may prefer to engage with a well-structured platform or portal instead. Self-service opportunities enable your customers to personalize their own collections experience to suit their own preferences. For customers who respond better to human contact, your team will have more time available to guide them back to financial health.
How to enhance the customer journey with self-service
Chat bots
To provide each customer with a specialized collections service, you need to engage them and collect data to inform future processes and payment offers. This can take significant time for your team to perform, especially now, when we’re seeing a high volume of accounts experiencing distressed debt.
Chat bots act as an efficient customer-facing solution by bringing automation to engagement. The data from this engagement is then recorded and used for future interactions to build a supportive customer experience that’s specific for their situation, including specialized payment offers.
Chat-bots humanize the customer journey by giving individuals control of their situation, simultaneously freeing agents to move their focus to higher risk, typically more complex accounts.
Customer portal
A key aspect of the Duty’s consumer support outcome is the ability to meet the customer’s needs throughout the business relationship. Customer portals act as an interface for customers to manage and resolve their debt in a personalized way. Self-service not only complies with the consumer support outcome of the Duty, but typically results in a significant boost to collections performance and customer retention.
Strengthen customer relationships
Providing customers with the freedom of choice in terms of engagement and self-service directly strengthens your relationship with them. Whether they prefer to interact via email, online portal, chat bot, SMS, or phone call, providing these options greatly increases the likelihood of engagement and payment.
By utilizing a configurable collections platform, you can record data tied to each channel. This equips your team with the data to immediately engage with customers via their preferred channels, increasing retention and enhancing collection performance.
Personalized customer experiences
Self-service is a solution that provides customers with the level of service they’re likely to respond to most, while meeting Consumer Duty standards. This is an ideal way to enhance the collection performance while humanizing the approach and hyper-personalizing the experience.
Our industry leading Debt Manager platform has the capability to provide a range of configurable self-service opportunities for each customer. With data-driven processes and AI-tools, your customers can have access to all the necessary portals and tools to fully self-serve and support the payment process.
To learn more about the capabilities of Debt Manager and how it can personalize and humanize self-service opportunities for your own customers, contact a member of our team today.
