An empathetic and humanized approach to collections has become a main priority in the modern collections space. But you also need to balance the efficiency and effectiveness of your strategy in order to provide the support that customers need. The good part is that they are not mutually exclusive.
Digital tactics and configurable platforms let you hyper-personalize the customer experience, improve customer communications and automate manual tasks to become more efficient. The result is a perfect balance of an effective and empathetic collections experience. Interested? Read on to find out more.
Hyper-personalization
Personalization has become a necessity in the collections space. Each customer has a different preference of engagement, whether it’s on the phone or through a self-service portal. Regardless of their preference, it is proven that you’ll enhance your collections performance if you accommodate it. More customers engage with you, you get more data, and you are better equipped to guide them to financial stability.
Hyper-personalization takes this a step further by harnessing the potential of AI, data and analytics to further humanize the experience for customers.
- Every interaction they have with you is recorded into a centralized system.
- From this data, you can perform thorough analytics to identify key characteristics leading to their delinquency.
- AI and machine learning can then segment customers based on their characteristics and assign them to a treatment path that will lead to an appropriate treatment path.
All of this is automated and easily configurable, making both your life and your customer’s easier through the collections process.
Improved communication and transparency
Alongside hyper-personalization, communication and engagement are integral to providing an effective and empathetic customer journey in collections. This includes being equally responsive on every channel, having clear contact timelines on each customer and being transparent on offering payment options that result in beneficial outcomes.
Each of these examples and more can be achieved through a configurable collections platform. They utilize a Single Source of Truth (SSoT) for data that records every point of contact for each customer. From there, any future communications are based on up-to-date data on the individual customer to best reach a resolution. Each engagement is automatically verified for compliance through built in rules and limits. This keeps you transparent without breaching any barriers, benefiting everyone involved.
Efficiency and timeliness
The last thing customers want in the collections process is to be waiting a while for payment offers or solutions to their situation. They are already in an uncomfortable situation, and making them wait unnecessarily is just going to make it worse.
Using data-driven processes and a configurable platform, you can minimize the time between entering a new account and debt resolution. These processes take advantage of analytics and customer data to determine the right treatment path for the customer. This requires no input from your team, or a technical specialist to perform. All you have to do is input the data, let the magic happen, then provide the customer with the right solution. Better yet, you can get the platform to automate the offer via SMS, saving your team even more time.
