Customers are getting very good at avoiding calls. Especially if you want to talk to them about what they owe.

Nobody wants to talk about debt. It is a difficult conversation to have. And what
clients keep telling me is that the best way of getting round this and to improve customer collections is to use multiple, but integrated, channels to communicate with them.

Make it harder to be ignored
Say you’re (as I see it) ‘chasing’ me. I’m certainly not going to take a phone call it my office, I’m not going to respond to a voice message in my workplace where other people can hear me. I may respond to a text… but probably only a real-time one, where I am actually having a conversation with a collections agent at the other end.

What I’m trying to say here is that customers that have a broad range of debt are typically aware when businesses call them, know how to deal with texts and voice messages, know how to avoid that conversation. What you need to be able to do in response, is use a broad cross-section of channels, so as give this ‘elusive customer’ a number of different alternatives by which they can communicate.

Clever communications
What’s even better: if you implement this strategy with an customer messaging expert, you can also benefit from some very clever technology, too. The elusive customer can be called from different numbers, for instance, so they don’t get to spot a number that they don’t like; VoiceSage has some very smart geo-location wizardry in the armory, to allow customers to be contacted from different cities.

Many solutions in the market only really offer text or interactive voice as their key channel. That’s just one of the ways where VoiceSage is different; really, we are channel (voice or text) agnostic. So the conversation may start with an text that may follow with a voice call, which then may follow with a text conversation. Even better – we can join all this up to give real visibility of what the most effective channel is, how the customer is interacting with the business.

Try something different
What really matters as a collections service though, is, of course, ‘promise to pay’ and ‘kept rate’. Intriguingly, text conversations are delivering very high levels of promises to pay and kept rates compared to voice messaging and normal text – but with significantly less internal resource. That means that chasing debt can become much more cost effective and release valuable collections agents to focus on more value adding activities and customers are more willing to engage in a more anonymous way.

Welcome to a world where technology can and will help you make it that much harder for the elusive customer!

More

Text messaging in collections – allowing agents to collect more

Pre-emptive customer contact: The next frontier in successful customer comms?

Getting the most out of your customer conversations

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