Improving Productivity and Collections Revenue While Mitigating Risk

For many businesses, debt collection is an unavoidable necessity. It is also one of the essential tasks a business needs to complete to see success and maintain a steady cash flow. Too often, consumers being contacted to pay outstanding debts are not receptive to the phone call, making the conversation awkward for call center agents and sometimes resulting in complaints about the tactics used. This has caused debt collection to become a highly regulated industry.

Understand the Regulations

There are numerous regulations and laws that businesses need to fully comprehend before launching debt collection activities. Laws including The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) and The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) both define standards that businesses must follow to properly notify and collect past due payments.

Some of the standards defined in these regulations include:

• Restrictions on the hours calls can be placed
• Limits on the number of times a consumer is contacted in one day
• Regulations on automated messages to commercial accounts
• Pre-authorized consent for certain calls
• Acceptable and unacceptable language
• Ensuring no threats of arrest are used to scare consumers

For many businesses, these regulations can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate. When call center agents are the ones contacting consumers for unpaid debt, remaining compliant is a significant risk and worry. Being accused of noncompliance leads to unexpected expenses including fines, loss of debt collection, and legal fees.

Maintain Debt Collection Compliance

The good news is there is an available solution for call centers. Customer interaction or speech analytics software is extremely valuable in debt collection. These solutions allow businesses to increase collections revenue while mitigating the risk of noncompliance.

Tracking Call Agent Performance

Speech analytics solutions record all incoming and outgoing conversations with customers and transcribe them into one searchable database. Businesses can define specific keywords that they want to listen for in conversations like non-compliant language or required disclosures. When certain wording is used, the software flags these conversations for further review. This technology quickly brings your attention to problem areas you need to address immediately with call center agents.

100% of Conversations

A significant benefit of a speech analytics call center solution is that you can automatically listen to every conversation. In other scenarios, businesses select a handful of conversations, but they don’t provide an overall view of collections performance. By tracking every conversation, you increase your chances of remaining compliant in addition to being able to compare outcomes and identify trends that lead to better debt collection.

Improve Results

Increase Productivity

Since conversations are reviewed automatically, businesses that utilize analytics software see an increase in productivity in their day-to-day activities. Managers can quickly identify what areas they need to educate all agents on or topics that individual agents need additional help with. By quickly addressing these, agents are better equipped to handle future calls more effectively.

Improve Performance

Another significant benefit of analytics software is its ability to deliver performance results via an agent dashboard using automated scorecards. Call center agents find this helpful because they can see how their performance compares to company goals and make adjustments for future calls. When agents have the knowledge they need to improve their overall performance, they are more likely to take the initiative to fix it before management needs to talk to them.

Create a Better Experience for Customers

Debt collection calls are usually not an enjoyable experience for customers. By tracking every conversation for compliance and the right language, businesses can pinpoint which tactics create engaged and happy customers.

Prepare A Better Defense

Receiving lawsuit papers outlining accusations of noncompliance is daunting, especially if you know you taking the necessary steps to remain compliant. By automatically recording phone calls and conversations across other channels you have a stronger defense in the courtroom, because you can use the transcripts to show proof of compliance.

In addition, you can require agents to mark customer accounts with call outcomes before they move onto the next interaction. This assures they can’t skip the crucial activity of proper documentation that can be the determining factor in a lawsuit outcome.

Increase Revenue

As a business owner, you want to invest in solutions that help your business grow, remain compliant, and build success.  When each of the above items falls into the right place, more revenue is generated and in many cases profits increase as well.

Where do you begin?

Speech Analytics solutions, like CallMiner Eureka, help businesses increase debt collection revenue while mitigating compliance risk. By automating the quality assurance process and agent scorecards, monitoring agent language and identifying best practices, you can create a strong debt collections culture in your call center. Each of these tactics improves your abilities allowing you to properly educate and review compliancy issues with agents as well as identify trends for positive outcomes and improved collector effectiveness.