Post-pandemic and post government support, a rise in consumer debt across multiple product types is widely expected. In addition to these economic factors, there has been a shift in consumer contact preferences with a strong bias towards digital channels. This move away from the traditional consumer behaviours is having a profound impact on debt recovery strategies.
Leveraging Digital Strategies to Maximize your Debt Recovery
To effectively address and plan for collection and debt recovery challenges, creditors will need to employ all the tools available. As the target audience preferences shift, it is important to understand the digital tools available, and adapt your processes to reflect the new target customer profile. Incorporating digital into your strategy tool kit will give you an incremental lift in your recoveries.
Here are some considerations when thinking about adding new technologies to your collections operations that assist in overall customer experiences.
- How do you leverage technology to connect and engage with customers on their preferred digital platforms throughout the collections process?
- Can you build or partner with a firm to provide a seamless and secure digital experience for a customer-centric collections process?
- Do you have the right protocols in place to ensure that you have secure and multi-factor authentication capabilities?
- Have you evaluated the flexibility of your collection strategy, outsourcing to partners where it makes sense?
- Have you reviewed your digital-led payment plans?
- Have you considered deploying digital self-service options such as:
- Mobile apps
- Automated voice trees
- Self-service web portals
Key Considerations to deliver powerful Debt Recovery Results:
Invest in technology and infrastructure or partner with an organization that has the infrastructure you need:
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- Expand digital assets to enable more email, text, mobile app, and online banking. Efforts to maximize customer qualification rates for digital contact channels are also highly recommended, including opt-in or -out, skip, and app access.
- Online banking could increase payments and reduce costs for call centers, while improving customer satisfaction. Most customers prefer to engage through an impersonal channel: if alerted by email and text, they can then take action by themselves.
Strong investment in data analytics, AI, and automation
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- Working with partners who can leverage data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) can help build customer profiles, including preferences, balance history, and days past due. Based on these attributes, extended digital approaches can be crafted, including sequence of contact (such as text, email), aided by automated processes.
Implement a customized multichannel communications strategy
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- The content, tone, and style of digital communications should be carefully crafted in recognition that digital-first customers prefer anonymity in interfacing and require more nuanced messaging relative to verbal communication.
The Wrap
Managing receivables is an important part of the effective management of your business. Like your other assets, they should be calculated and managed to provide as much value as possible to your enterprise. This is often a difficult task to effectively manage internally, often with limited resources.
At Canaccede Financial Group, we help highlight where outsourcing your debt recovery can offer some smart and cash accretive alternatives. CFG is the largest multi-asset acquirer in Canada, and we provide both debt servicing and purchasing solutions. Whether you’re looking to optimize your insolvencies or charged-off assets, our expert valuation team can work with you to evaluate the debt recovery potential for your organization. If you, or someone on your team would like to find out more, please contact us a partnerships@canaccede.com .
To find out more about CFG and how we can help, click here
