Aspect’s three tips to improve collection results

by Aspect

ACCORDING Credit Action, UK personal debt stood at £1,457bn at the end of July 2009, with average household debt standing at £58,280.  Around 178 properties are repossessed every day — and a person will become bankrupt or enter into an Individual Voluntary Arrangement every 3.5 minutes.

They are alarming statistics for businesses chasing debt repayment.  But they are also a call to action.  Businesses need to take a good look at the technology and processes they have in place to ensure debt collection and take whatever actions are necessary to improve “right party contacts” and enhance monies collected. 

Aspect, a unified communications solutions provider, suggests three possibilities:

Use technology to segment debtors according to risk level.  If you have low-risk or debtors on payment plans who just need simple payment reminders, use outbound self-service to reach out to them.  Remind them of impending due dates and enable them to make immediate payments over the phone — freeing up agents to work on riskier accounts.

Use outbound dialling and campaign management capabilities.  Campaign management applications learn from calling experiences and use sophisticated patented algorithms to predict the best number to call and the best hour of day to reach a person at that number in the future without getting through to an answering machine or family member.  The odds are you will reduce call attempts, increase your collections yield, and lower telecommunications costs.

Improve your workforce management (WM). You don’t want agents sitting around twiddling their thumbs, or customers having to call you back and then hanging up because your hold time is too long and/or they have to be transferred to specialist collectors.  So make sure you’re using WM capabilities to optimally schedule outbound agents. 

These are just some of the actions you can take — the rest is up to you.  Has your organisation developed any best practices or innovative processes to improve debt collection?