Are you convinced you’re doing all you can to maximise your returns in Collections?
Some say the ‘Time Makes the Wine’ but when does the right time become too early or too late? When it comes to something as simple as the Due Date, is this a single day or is it actually a period? And what is the correct approach to make? And how assertive should you be?
The constantly shifting customer trends are often difficult to navigate so to make things easier for your team we’ve pulled together data from thousands of our clients (and over two million live customer accounts) to bring you this ‘Collections Common Timelines’ blog series, so you can measure your how your timelines stack up against the 6 steps in collections:
- Setting Up for Success
- Pre-Due Collections
- Due Date
- Early Collections
- Late Collections
- Late Late Collections
Short on time and want to read all 6 phases at your convenience? To download the Collections Timelines Whitepaper
Click Here
The Covid19 pandemic and changing technology have been at the forefront of driving trends recently and we know just how difficult it is to stay up on top of the data whilst at the same time updating the multiple systems and processes used in Collections.
We all know it’s never been more important to make sure what you’re delivering is not only relevant but also appropriate. So to lend a helping hand we’ve pooled our data into a single space so you can benchmark your activities against the larger industry.
In this week’s post, we discuss our third step of the Collections Timelines Process: Due Date. We explain the average length of time, the approach and tone collections teams should use and also give a sample of the actions we would take during this phase. Enjoy!
Due Date
Multiple payment runs (such as re-presenting direct debits) can elongate the ‘due date’ from day 0 to day 3.
Reactive communications must be sent out at this stage to keep the Customer informed of the success (or not) of any payment attempt. The quicker you can let a customer know of a failed payment, the quicker the account can be rehabilitated.
An API integration is integral for strategies at this stage – a quick notification from your system can trigger immediate communications to customers based on success.
Want to know more about CRS? Here’s our Tech & Services brochure
CRS in Action
At CRS we use a combination of contact channels to alert a customer as soon as their instalment has failed on a Continuous Payment Authority (CPA) payment arrangement.
An SMS message prompts them to log back into their online account and make the payment manually if, for example, their card details have changed since setting the arrangement with us. Letting them know immediately is vital as typically these arrangements are set up on paydays.
We are also able to generate unique document links to send via SMS which can present an invoice to a customer as soon as it becomes due as part of our White Label service. This ensures that the invoice is received on the due date and customers are encouraged to make a payment without having to wait for a physical copy to arrive in the post.
This approach increases the speed of presentation which allows us to issue a greater volume of follow up contacts should payment not be received before the collections process intensifies to Early Collections.
Final words from CRS
Thank you for taking the time to read this post. If you’d to read through all of the 6 phases of the collections process in your own time then you can download the COLLECTIONS TIMELINES White Paper here or if you’d like to find out more about our technology and services you can download our brochure here.
