In the debt collection industry, many automated tools for debt recovery are inefficient and do not offer and optimal customer experience. More importantly, they provide basic functionalities not aligned with the innovation that businesses demand. Mistrust from debtors due to non-omnichannel self-service flows, lack of humanization and not proactively informing them affects debt recovery.
To mitigate these shortcomings, it is necessary to implement debt collection tools that offer much more than a self-service option. Solutions based on innovative technology that increase efficiency and inspire confidence in debtors.
Maximizing efficiency in debt collection solutions
When a contact center focused on debt collections interacts with a customer automatically, intelligence must apply. It is crucial that the customer experience is similar to that offered by a contact center agent, natural and frictionless. The debtor demands to be informed at all times about the status of his debt and not only to be contacted when it gets out of control. He/she wants a full omnichannel experience. Maintaining the context of the interaction regardless if it is later on escalated to a live agent. In addition, it is necessary to offer options that guarantee the security of transactions, such as online payments and data authentication.
This is exactly what Communications Portal achieves: to optimize efficiency and productivity of debt collections management. This open, standards-based platform allows development of self-service applications and integrate them with all channels of communications.
Communications Portal not only allows self-management of debt recovery through inbound voice interactions. It extends the spectrum to outbound calls, SMS messages and email. A wide range of options that allow bidirectional communications with debtors. In addition, it offers integration with natural speech recognition engines and data authentication.
All of the above converges in automating collection management between the company and the debtor with an innovative solution. Emulating the experience given by the agents and following the same business rules so that debt recovery is profitable.
Optimization of debt recovery through an omnichannel experience that inspires confidence
Offering self-management in debt collections through different communication channels is no longer enough. The important thing here is to integrate all the channels in an omnichannel approach. Based on business rules, customer profiles, industry requirements and safety standards.
If a client initiates a self-service session to solve his debt through an automatic call, it doesn´t matter if it is later continue on a chat session. The collections contact center should be aware of what happened and not request information already provided by the customer. Much less, try to collect a debt that has already been canceled, as it will generate distrust in the debtor.
An efficient collection process is based upon trust that the debtor has with his collections company. The context of each conversation maintains, so that the customer experience is transparent and uninterrupted.
Humanization of conversations is key
When a debtor requests to settle a debt automatically, he/she expects to do so naturally. Not through endless monotonous audios that ultimately fail to offer a profitable solution. Many collection contact centers manage debt recovery automatically by offering dehumanizing customer experiences. Artificial intelligence has been fundamental to reinvent this issue, facilitating the evolution of voice recognition to natural voice understanding.
Traditional voice self-service tools do not offer natural speech recognition. If at the time of solving a debt, the customer does not say exactly the word programmed in the system, it will not recognize it. Artificial intelligence allows configuration of different sets of alternative words and recognizes intentions. As a result, it can provide a much more natural conversation and the customer experience will be much more fluid. It will increase the overall efficiency of the collection process and its productivity.
Providing proactive customer experience
Unidirectional reminders are efficient. They allow the debtors to be informed about pending payments. However, they do not offer the possibility of engaging in a bidirectional automatic conversation. Any notification should be actionable so that the client responds immediately and thus receives more information. This increases the productivity of collection management and maximizes the chances of success.
It is crucial to be able to design and send proactive bidirectional outbound notifications through email, SMS or apps. Thus, the collection contact centers will not have to pursue their debtors. The latter will have firsthand information at all times regarding debt status, through their preferred communication channel. In this way, companies can guarantee excellence in customer experience through an omnichannel strategy.
Keep customers at the center of everything
Collections contact centers should focus their efforts to offer innovative solutions focused on optimizing its debtor´s customer journey. Through any communication channel and regardless of where debt recovery management began. Ensuring that customer experience is safe but at the same time efficient and natural.
Debt collection tools allow reduction of 10% to 15% in calls managed by agents. In addition, they enable up to 1000 automatic calls per hour and increase useful contacts by 25%. They also allow raising productivity of the collection processes and improving their efficiency while optimizing customer experience.
For instance, consider a company that decides to implement artificial intelligence to offer self-management for collections. The Communications Portal allows developing a self-service flows for each type of debtor and integrate it with the advanced natural language understanding engine from Microsoft or IBM. In this way, the debtor interacts through a much more natural automatic voice call. The system will detect intentions and not just keywords. Unlike with simple ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) or TTS (Text To Speech) engines. The system consults its database and validates the debtor´s payment capabilities, in order to send payment instructions. The latter can be done by sending a text message that contains a link to an online payment platform. If the debtor prefers it, he/she can even request to contact a live agent.
Everything works naturally and in a 100% conversational manner, emulating customer experience offered by a collections agent. This debt collections tools allows setting up omnichannel strategies from a unique platform. Hence optimizing debt recovery based upon each debtor´s capabilities through reliable conversations.
Would you like to know how one of our customers improved its customer journey with these solutions? Find out in its case study.
