Building relationships with your customers is a long-term commitment. You need to be positive and supportive from beginning to end of their collections journey, with no inconsistencies. Only then will you have the level of engagement to reliably clear accounts and efficiently hit KPIs.
In this article, we explore the steps to building reliable customer engagement in collections from a podcast conversation between Christina Fisher (Manager, Growth Marketing) of C&R Software and Chris Petrewski (Collections Manager) of Truckstop.com.
Start building your relationships early
Your first moment of contact with any customer, regardless of industry, is an extremely important one. More often than not, it can be the make or break between a customer engaging with you in future cases or becoming unresponsive and difficult to clear.
You need to hit the ground running when it comes to those first few points of contact. You need to be able to work out the right channel, time of day and frequency required to support your customers in a way that accommodates their needs and situation. And better yet, you need to be able to do it at scale but still maintain that personalized experience for each of your accounts.
Use communications strategically to build engagement
Once you’ve started building the foundations of your customer relationship, you need to be strategic with your future communications. This is for two reasons. One, there are regulatory measures against contacting customers too much, such as the 7-in-7 rule of the FDCPA. This prevents you from calling your customers more than 7 times within a single week.
Two, you need to continue your relationship by using the right channels of communication. Say one of your customers has missed a payment. A simple SMS reminder will likely be enough. But if one of your customers has a significant outstanding balance and long account lifespan, they will likely need a direct call to get the support they need to reach a debt resolution.
You need to contact the right customer, on the right channel, at the right time. Moreover, you need to do it for each of your customers as your accounts grow. And, in order to be successful, you need modern software to accomplish this level of personalization.
And use a configurable platform to keep it simple at scale
When it comes to being strategic with your communications, you need a configurable platform in order to do it at scale. Not only can they integrate with a number of systems to make your team’s lives easier, but it provides your customers with a seamless end-to-end experience that helps to build that important relationship.
- Machine learning: Configurable platforms support machine learning models that can perform analytics on historical data. For you, this means being able to look at a customers’ data and work out the best channel, time, and frequency of contact based on what’s worked in the past. With this knowledge, you have the ability to hit the ground running with those initial points of contact.
- Omnichannel support: Configurable platforms store your customer’s contact preferences and integrate with your preferred omnichannel system. This accommodates their preference of contact as well as ensures compliance with communication regulations.
- AI and automation: To maintain strong customer relationships at scale, configurable platforms support a number of AI-tools to automate communications. Simple SMS reminders and self-service capabilities can be automated. This means that your team can focus their efforts on calling and supporting customers to financial stability.
Build better customer relationships with C&R Software
Relationships are the foundation of any successful collections strategy. Without them, you have no reliable alternative to get the engagement you need to support your customers to financial stability.
At C&R Software, our industry leading Debt Manager platform makes it simple to build meaningful relationships. With omnichannel support, AI-tools and machine learning integrations, you can strategically build and maintain your customer relationships to result in enhanced collections performance.
To find out more details about the conversation between Christina and Chris, watch the podcast here. To find out more about how Debt Manager can help you build meaningful customer relationships, contact a member of our team today.
