The pandemic's aftermath and rising living costs has propelled an unprecedented number of individuals into collections, many for the first time. Against this backdrop, collections firms need to adopt a customer-centric approach that is both transparent and flexible to guide customers to financial health. A configurable and cloud-native solution can provide this collections experience, ensuring that firms can approach collections with empathy, efficiency, and effectiveness.
In this article, we explore the importance of customer centricity in collections from a podcast conversation between Christina Fisher (Manager, Growth Marketing) of C&R Software and Megan Bird (Senior Credit & Collections Manager) of Paycor.
The importance of customer centricity
Overall American household debt totaled $17.50 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2023, and global debt has reached a record $307 trillion. Aftershocks of the pandemic, the rising cost of living and reliance on Buy-Now-Pay-Later plans has led to more people than ever before entering collections. And many of these customers are facing delinquency for the first time.
As a collections firm, it’s your responsibility to help these customers navigate the road from delinquency to financial stability. But in order to do this, you need to be empathetic and customer centric in your approach. These are real people struggling with financial challenges, so you need to support their needs from beginning to end of the collections journey.
Why you need to be transparent and flexible
To better support your customers in an uncertain economic climate, you need to adopt a transparent and flexible approach to collections. Every communication, engagement, and interaction with your customers needs to be clear and concise to boost engagement. If it isn’t, accounts can become unresponsive from misunderstanding the collections journey. But more importantly, transparency directly fosters long-term loyalty and trust between you and your customers.
Alongside transparency, you need to be flexible in your approach with each individual account. No one customer is the same as the next, with each facing a different number of personal and financial challenges. You need to be able to provide flexible and dynamic solutions to each of these customers, whether it be personalized repayment plans or deadline extensions. This greatly increases the level of centricity, likelihood of repayment and collections performance as a result.
How to achieve customer centricity from beginning to end of the collections journey
When it comes to customer centricity, legacy software simply can’t keep up with modern standards. This is why you need a configurable and cloud-native solution that can integrate with an array of systems to support transparent and flexible collections experiences for your customers.
- Omnichannel support - Configurable platforms store your customer’s contact preferences and integrate with your preferred omnichannel system. Whether they prefer interacting via phone, email, SMS, or online platforms, you can provide consistent support across each to reinforce engagement.
- Hyper-personalization - Configurable platforms provide you with the capabilities to leverage data analytics to understand your customers on a personal level. You can then use these analytics to deliver hyper-personalized strategies via self-service portals, direct phone calls, or whichever form of contact suits the customer.
- Operationalized AI - Configurable platforms harness the power of AI to automate manual tasks behind the scenes so your team can stay on customer support. Extensions and adjustments on repayment plans can be automated and recorded while your team focuses their efforts on guiding your customers to financial stability.
Place customer centricity at each step of the collections journey with C&R Software
Being transparent, empathetic and flexible with your customers is the key to guiding customers from delinquency to financial stability. In the modern world of economic uncertainty, customer centricity is the road to enhanced collections performance.
At C&R Software, our industry leading Debt Manager provides the capabilities to enhance operational efficiency and build a pathway to genuine customer engagement. By integrating with cutting-edge technology such as AI, omnichannel support, and hyper-personalization, Debt Manager enables you to fully support your customers and offer transparent and flexible solutions tailored to individual needs.
To find out more details about the conversation between Christina and Megan, watch the podcast here. To find out more about how Debt Manager can help you provide customer centricity throughout your collections journey, contact a member of our team today.
