THOUGHT BOX

As the UK COVID-19 lockdown #2 is upon us, we can take a lot of learning from our initial experience in March and April. Some companies had extensive preparations completed to ensure business continuity, but the scale of the disruption inevitably caught many off guard. Many of our clients had to act quickly to get agents remotely working and engaging with customers within 24hours.This post offers some advice from what we have learned over the last six months from working with clients through the pandemic and helping them manage their customer conversations especially in light the extension of mortgage payment holidays.

Over the course of the last 6 months the Webio team received calls from existing and new clients who were scrambling to react with lightning speed to the needs of their customers and the businesses. Now with a little distance in the rear-view mirror, we are going to look at the role that conversational messaging played in getting agents back engaging with customers in a better and more efficient way. And highlight the wins that clients achieved.

With so much distraction it can be challenging to connect with customers, especially if you work in credit and collections. But over the past few years we have somewhat of a sea change. Customers who do not want to be contacted are increasingly more likely to respond and engage if they don't have to have a voice-to-voice conversation with a debt collections agent. So, what has changed?

As we all are well aware, organisations have quickly shifted to remote conferencing and engagement for their internal team communications. From Zoom, Teams to Slack the communication and collaboration platform options are endless with many making the jump overnight. But what about customer interactions, where do they fit in? We have more communication platforms, more messaging, more options and its' hard to keep it all straight. We are in a period of significant social change and the new normal is just super saturated with communications.