Note: This post is the final installment in a four-part series based on CCC’s research, “Pillars of a Customer-Driven Collections Strategy”.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve offered our perspective on how to create a truly customer-oriented collections strategy—one that both leverages customer insight and motivates staff to exhibit customer-focused behaviors. In this final installment, I’ll discuss how tracking customer experience metrics for collections agents can motivate customer-focused behaviors that help preserve long-term relationships—a key challenge facing our membership given new enterprise standards for customer satisfaction and higher customer churn stemming from increased competition. Read More »

Note: This post is the third in a four-part series based on CCC’s research, “Pillars of a Customer-Driven Collections Strategy”. In this series, we’ll discuss the research findings and best practices that can help your organization adopt a more effective approach to debt collections—moving away from a pure quantity focus and toward a quality, customer-oriented collections strategy.

Building strong cross-functional collaboration is one of those ever true key tenets of management literature.

In the past I have addressed how improved collaboration can help drive better customer insights and help organizations make better use of CRM investments, not to mention elevate the role of the service and support organization.  I want to continue the dialogue here by focusing on another, critical cross-functional collaboration opportunity whose impact is often underestimated: collections.

While it may seem that collaboration with collections is a lower priority, managing the collections process more closely can actually result in a win-win-win—better revenues, greater efficiency, and a better customer experience.  In fact, companies that do not make partnering with collections a priority risk operational inefficiencies, increasing delinquent account volume, and mitigating collections success.  In today’s hopefully recovering economic climate, that can translate to big revenue. Read More »

By Matt Hoffman

Note: This post is the second in a four-part series based on CCC’s research, “Pillars of a Customer-Driven Collections Strategy”.

Analyzing the data produced by collections is no easy task, as collections is charged with managing multiple goals across multiple channels.  Determining the best e-mail, phone, and website strategies to increase the net money collected without unnecessarily harming customer satisfaction involves complicated trade-offs that are hard to communicate.

Simplification is the typical solution for this kind of problem in other parts of the organization.  Consider a service center trying to increase customer satisfaction.  Data can be used to simplify this directional goal (“Increase CSAT”) into simple facts (“Customers that are given an irrelevant cross-sell are 15% less satisfied, while customer that are given a relevant cross-sell are 10% more satisfied”).  These types of data are highly actionable; in the hypothetical example, leaders now know that eliminating irrelevant cross-selling will significantly increase customer satisfaction.

Unfortunately, this level of simplification is often misleading in the collections environment. Read More »

Note: This post is the first in a four-part series based on CCC’s research, “Pillars of a Customer-Driven Collections Strategy”. In this series, we’ll discuss the research findings and best practices that can help your organization adopt a more effective approach to debt collections—moving away from a pure quantity focus and toward a quality, customer-oriented collections strategy.

While we’re beginning to hear good news that the U.S. and global economies are poised to rebound, tough financial times—and the high delinquency volumes that accompany them—continue to have some big implications for collections in many organizations. To better understand this timely topic, CCC turned to our membership network, where conversations revealed not only a diverse set of challenges associated with the collections function, but also highlighted a wide range of strategies that companies pursue when it comes to collections.

In terms of strategy, most companies realize the insufficiency of a pure quantity-based approach that stresses “more calls, more dollars”—and often neglects the cost side of the equation. Such an unfocused model inevitably leads to poor decision-making and misallocation of resources, giving a “one-size-fits-all” treatment to all accounts, even those that will eventually self-cure. Read More »