The collections industry has evolved over recent years, driven by many factors including industry regulation, the covid pandemic, and overall consumer behaviour. I think it’s fair to say that the collections and recoveries industry has traditionally lagged behind many other industry sectors when it comes to technology adoption and evolution. However customer behaviour and demand for new ways to engage is creating a need for businesses to improve their technology and overall approach to consumer engagement. There now seems to be an acceptance that not everyone wants to engage in the same way, some customers want to speak to a person, others want to complete all transactions online, and some want to be able to choose between channels depending on their specific need for each interaction.  We need to be able to give people the choice to engage in a way that suits them and provide the levels of support and information needed regardless of the channel of their choosing.

 95% of the UK population now own a mobile device and we have seen an explosion of the app-based finance culture where most people now see self-service, smartphone solutions as a necessity rather than a ‘nice to have’.  They demand a certain level of customer service alongside their digital conveniences, not least of all in the debt collection space.  Today’s customers want the online tools to be able to help themselves at a time that is convenient to them, they want to take control of their finances and they want the technology to support it.  Historically the greatest obstacle businesses face when dealing with their indebted customers is engagement.

We should think of ‘digital’ as an experience and not a set of technical functionalities

We have seen the phrase ‘digital’ used across our industry for some time now, but what do we really mean when we say ‘digital’?  I frequently hear businesses tell me that they ‘are digital’ but what his often means is that they use SMS and email, they may have IVR or IVM technology, and perhaps an online payments page.  For me, these are disparate pieces of technology that serve a purpose but don’t provide a wholesale end to end customer experience.  We need to start thinking of digital as a way to deliver a better experience, not a set of technical functionalities.

Digital technology is already beginning to deliver almost humanlike interactions, making smart decisions and delivering up bespoke content to consumers.  However the use of this technology is often fragmented and used in pockets across customer journeys.  We see examples of chatbots helping customers to retrieve their balance, or details of a recent transaction but their scope is still relatively limited.  The future of collections will see smartbots that can interact across the entire lifecycle of a customer account, answering, predicting and resolving all aspects of the customer query whilst also achieving the best outcome for the business.  Customer journeys will combine all digital technology into one seamless journey, using smartbots to handle customer conversations whilst the web platform reacts to customer responses and business logic to serve up web content to provide a conversation like experience.

How do we build trust through Digital channels?

Trust, transparency and customer loyalty are not phrases often associated with the collections industry, however they need to be.  Experience has shown that the most powerful customer engagement comes from building trust between a business and their customers.