The emphasis of self-service in collections and recovery is a product of the increasing importance of customer-centricity. Supporting the preferences of customers and providing them with opportunities to self-cure is proven to improve the rate of recovery and improve collection performance.
C&R Software’s Debt Manager, the industry-leading platform for collections and recovery, provides businesses with seamless integration of self-service features at different levels. In this guide, we explore these features and how they directly result in improved collection and recovery performance while humanizing the process for customers.
Make paying bills easy with Consumer Portal
A true self-service experience is one that provides customers with the ability to manage their own account and payments. Not only does this shift control into the customer’s hands so that they can self-resolve, but moves account management tasks away from agents to redirect their efforts where it is needed.
Debt Manager provides you with a complete Consumer Portal interface so that your customers can view, manage and resolve debt in a personalized way. It supports adjusted payment plan options based on data-driven models that adapt to each account, providing individual solutions for each customer. By using Consumer Portal, you’ll see a significant boost to collection performance while bringing efficiency opportunities to the overall process.
Omnichannel support for customer self-service
Omnichannel communications are the foundation of a modern collections process. With regulation changes that protect customers from continued contact and the rise of importance tied to their preference, businesses now need to provide this support or fall behind. Enabling customers to use their preferred channel of communication throughout their journey both improves their experience and directly enhances the likelihood of reaching a resolution.
With Debt Manager, you have the ability to seamlessly integrate each individual customer channel with your workflows and treatment paths, no matter if they prefer email or SMS. This directly results in hyper-personalization and self-service opportunities via a configurable platform that you can customize as you see fit. Not only that, but Debt Manager has ML and AI capabilities to automate payment offers via SMS that are based on customer characteristics, providing them with the ability to self-resolve.
Provide customers with more self-resolution opportunities via Cara
Chat-bots have quickly become an integral part of many customer facing platforms. For collections and recovery, they are invaluable for their automation capabilities and the confidence they bring for customers that find it difficult to talk directly to agents. Chat-bots directly humanize the customer journey by giving them control of their situation, while simultaneously giving agents the ability to move their focus onto higher risk accounts.
C&R Software has developed their very own virtual assistant, Cara. She has a range of capabilities to help customers self-serve, such as verifying ID, guiding them through the process, presenting offers based on their account data and directing them to a payment plan that will benefit their specific situation. All of these features are fully configurable and based on the workflows you integrate into Debt Manager, automating the mundane tasks and humanizing your customer journey through self-service.
Humanize via self-service
Customer self-service doesn’t function off of omnichannel support and chat bots alone. They need to be integrated with a platform that can both automate and execute workflows that fit your industry and customer needs. That way, customers can feel like they are reaching financial health in their own, personalized way; which is far more likely to lead to resolving debt.
Debt Manager seamlessly integrates with the systems and workflows you upload, while also offering configurability to tweak areas in real-time. If a customer needs a more direct approach, or if they are experiencing an economic or emotional circumstance that your workflows aren’t accounting for, you can respond quickly and efficiently.
Debt Manager also showcases inbuilt ML and AI functionality to incorporate automation, customer segmentation and risk management into your processes. These help support self-service by distinguishing customers based on their account characteristics, and then using historical data to automatically assign them to predetermined treatment paths. This is then integrated into their channel preference or through Cara to present payment offers and plan options, completely automated to bring efficiency and gives agents the ability to focus on higher risk accounts.
Utilize configurability to both personalize and humanize the collections process
By utilizing the self-service capabilities that are at your disposal when using Debt Manager, you humanize the customer journey and enhance collections and recovery performance to efficiently hit important KPIs.
Omnichannel support provides stable and reliable communication with customers that suits their preferences, while enabling you to provide self-service opportunities via these channels. Cara builds upon this by utilizing AI and workflows to automate payment offers and plans, giving customers the ability to self-resolve while you redirect agent resources where they are needed.
Debt Manager is the industry’s leading debt collections and recovery solution, with an abundant, powerful feature set that make it the platform of choice for organizations, governments and financial institutions the world over. To find out more about how Debt Manger’s machine learning-supported features resolve more debt and humanize collections, contact a member of our team today.
