Not having your debt collection activities automated comes with a cost. We see companies bemoaning the high resource costs, high agent turnover and the far too many human errors of older collection methods. From the customer side, they avoid their creditors as best they can, which gives poor response rates and even poorer collection rates.
Trying to do debt collection via telephone with diallers simply does not bring in the returns you need. Today, your customers are moving to mobile messaging as their primary means of communicating and it therefore makes sense to switch from diallers to conversational messaging when you contact them.
What do you automate in the collections process? In this article, we’re looking specifically at automating customer engagement, with the intention of a securing a promise-to-pay or payment.
To better understand why automated debt collection delivers on all fronts, here are 11 benefits.
For example, Snap Finance in the UK testify that their response rate for outbound conversational text messaging outperforms their diallers by three-fold, and delivers a 60% increase in response rates for the completion of Income & Expenditure forms.
As the number of positive customer engagements increases, so too does the debt recovery, especially if you provide a way to pay from within the conversation itself. A leading UK retailer has seen a 52% increase in payments since adopting conversational SMS.
Companies that use conversational AI can typically have over 70% of customer engagements taken care of by collections chatbots. With Machine Learning, a chatbot can quickly deliver 40% automation within three months and reach 70%-80% as the ML increases.
Even when an agent needs to visit a customer in person, they can sort the basic steps, such as ID and Verification, beforehand using mobile messaging. During the Covid pandemic, agents could not conduct in-person visits and companies soon realised the power of messaging via digital channels.
Customers choose self-service above other methods when it comes to simple tasks. It is efficient and convenient for the user and saves time and resources for the companies themselves.
Source: Customer Connections Report: The new conversations rules in credit, collections and payments
When using multichannel messaging, all the conversations from all the channels are visible from one central dashboard. This gives agents better conversation management and allows them to track the progress of a client interaction.
Customers prefer digital conversational messaging as:
The very nature of automated debt collection, i.e., it is digital and cloud-based, allows for real-time integration with other solutions and databases, like payment gateways, which makes the whole system more powerful.
All compliance regulations can be encoded into the workflow design, and each action and conversation is recorded, which gives you a solid audit trail that is electronically secured.
Specialist reporting tools can be integrated with the debt collection platform to give multi-level insights into all collections activities.
This graphic visually sums up what automated debt collection is all about.
The tide is turning and it’s becoming the norm to use mobile messaging for to reach your customers. Today, people feel at home on their mobiles and texting is a native language, so it is no surprise that conversational customer engagement is thriving on digital messaging channels. Once an organisation starts using automated debt collection, the use of technology such as diallers gets dropped to 25% or less.
If you need to improve your customer engagement, talk to us and we'll show you how AI automation via digital messaging apps works.
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