Given the current economic scenario, the increasing levels of debt and delinquency, debt collection is becoming more challenging than ever before. Organizations that were earlier competing with one another to provide loans, mortgages or credit cards are now struggling to recover those loans. Slow payments or bad debts can have a crippling effect on any business. Therefore, it is critical for organizations to ensure that debts owed to them are collected in time.
In order to safeguard their financial stability, collection agencies must work towards improving collection processes and boosting the overall productivity of service agents. An efficient collection strategy not only boosts the debt collection revenues, but also ensures long-term stability and growth for an organization.
Increase Productivity with Automated Dialing System
In the traditional debt recovery scenario that uses manual dialing, a collection agent has to manually dial out numbers. This means dealing with connectivity issues, busy tones, no answer or answering machines, and physically taking down notes for each interaction. As a result, the agent has limited productive time of not more than 15 minutes in an hour and he can connect with only 40-50 contacts in a day. An automated dialer, on the other hand, reduces the agent’s idle time which enables him to connect with more people, leading to better results.
Effective use of advanced automated dialing solutions can have a dramatic impact on debt collection and can help agents improve their connected rates by 120 – 200%. This means that in a given hour, each collection agent’s talk time is equivalent to 45 minutes and he can handle almost twice the number of calls in a day. Predictive dialing software and automatic dialer algorithms can improve call efficiency by lowering the wait time, number of dropped calls and idle time of agents. Based on factors like call duration, availability and skills of agents, the calls can be automatically routed to the agents.
Build an Intelligent Collection Strategy
Collection companies must build a set of processes or structure for analyzing debtors, evaluating the criticality of payments and defining the collection strategy for each debtor. For example, a debtor may have simply forgotten to pay, in which case just a gentle reminder may work. On the other hand, if the debtor is a chronic defaulter who is delaying the payment as there are penalties involved, you may need to work out a more intelligent strategy.
The collection processes must be able to analyze each debtor individually and assess their propensity for repayment. Environmental variables must be evaluated to identify the reasons that could have led to non-payment. Structuring this entire process helps in coming up with intelligent strategies in order to reach out to each debtor with a personalized plan.
Customer Mapping and Right Party Connect
To achieve success with debt recovery, it is extremely essential to ensure that your collection agents are talking to the right people. Even a high-performance dialing system may not deliver results if you are not connecting with the right people. Therefore, you need to configure your dialing solution in a way that it can effectively map customer behavior to the dialing algorithm.
Based on call history and other available data, customers can be automatically segmented for further processing of queries as per the needs of the business process, increasing the Right Party Connect (RPC) by over 30%. Advanced dialing solutions can be used to allocate the most skilled agents to serve chronic defaulters while allowing other agents for routine queries. Supervisors can define agent skill-set by analysis of reports as per requirements. Companies must make sure they assign their best agents to handle chronic cases for quicker and assured collection.
Value-Based Collection and Prioritization
Another approach to ensure efficiency in debt collection is by treating each debtor differently on the basis of the value attached to debt. Algorithms can be created in a way that the most skilled agent is responsible for the largest amount of debt to be recovered. Value-based collection can prove to be quite effective as more skilled agents can be assigned to such debtors with high level of priority. As the large debts get cleared early in, the process automatically reaches more efficiency.
Having a good automated dialing solution maximizes agent efficiency and also ensures that the collection strategy is being implemented properly. In order to achieve best results, the dialing system must integrate with the company’s business priorities and needs. With reduction in number of dropped calls, high uptime and reliability of the solution, the collection organization can significantly improve their debt collection ratio.
About Teckinfo
Incorporated in 1995, Teckinfo Solutions Pvt. Ltd. is a leading provider of Converged Voice and Data Solutions. Teckinfo’s strength lies in developing and implementing comprehensive solutions for Contact Centers, Helpdesks, CRM and other Unified Communication Products and Solutions. Our solutions are highly scalable and flexible, thus empowering organizations to effectively facilitate customer engagement while improving the overall customer experience.
For more information on our state-of-the-art technology, please visit us at https://www.teckinfo.com/call-center-software-interdialog.php
Drafted & written by Manisha Gupta