What needs to be reassessed in the utility sector? 

Many households, especially those with moderate incomes, may experience payment failures due to the growing cost of living. As a result, more people will cancel their direct debits and may not be familiar with procedures, technical jargon, potential consequences or how they can seek help and support.

Firms must ensure that customers understand their options when falling behind with payments, and how they can support them. In addition, businesses must ensure that their collections strategy and communications are clear and straightforward helping to take away anxiety in an already stressful situation. This will be crucial to secure customer retention through the cost of living crisis and beyond.

Over the coming months there will be a lot of customers wanting to get in touch regarding their increasing charges, unpaid bills and looking to get payment plans in place. As a result, energy providers will need to consider how their operations will support this increased demand. However, for some energy firms they may use the emerging situation as an opportunity to drive innovation and implement improvements across their overall collection strategy approach.

Young people were hit hard by the pandemic and are now facing another uphill battle to make ends meet, as they are significantly more likely to have fallen behind on domestic bills and credit card repayments. This presents a growing need for a frictionless digital collections experience, as this generation of digital natives has high expectations for engaging with quality digital experiences.

Is a customer-centric end-to-end digital collections strategy the solution?

The evolution of the Digital era has and will continue to shape consumer behaviour and demands. Changing consumer behaviour means that companies who are wanting to engage with their customers need to adapt and refresh their customer service approach accordingly.

Implementing a digital debt collection platform that allows end-to-end self-service, with a great customer experience is what companies need today.

Our products and approach have evolved through our significant experience leading the digital transformation across Collections and Recoveries operations, enabling businesses to lower operational costs, increase recoveries, reduce regulatory risk and importantly improve customer experience.

• Flexible platform – making it easy for businesses to configure the solution.
• Data driven – A data driven platform allowing personalisation for customer journeys.
• Total Control – Code-driven compliance and high configuration ability to adapt to changes.
• Operational Efficiency – Enabling your customers to self-serve will reduce the demand and effort required in your operation, saving FTE and operational costs.
• Digital Engagement – Digital-first approach leveraging digital comms to drive engagement. 
• Customer Satisfaction – Improved overall customer experience and satisfaction by giving customers more choice in how they can engage.