The Coronavirus (COVID-19) has hit every industry like a tidal wave.
Debt collections teams are being closed down across the world and unless your company has a digital strategy in place, you’ll also be feeling the weight of uncertainty hanging heavy on your shoulders. If your company is feeling the pinch, have you considered using a technology-driven Debt Collection Agency (DCA) to pick up the slack during this period?
Interested in our services? to book a digital, self-isolation friendly meeting.
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If/when the UK follows suit with other countries in Europe and the government enforces a national lockdown; it will put huge pressure on collections teams nationwide but your customers also live in a digital world. In 2018 Ofcom stated that nearly 80% of the UK public owned a smartphone (95% of 16-24yr olds). Whether it’s social media, communicating or paying for things online, feedback suggested people feel their devices were the one thing they couldn’t be without; and during this outbreak they won’t be.
Like all DCA’s we utilise all of the traditional collections tools but during these unprecedented, globally turbulent times, we’re blessed that over the past 10 years we’ve invested a huge amount of our resources into technology, developing state of the art automated systems, programmes and processes. This helps our clients’ customers manage their debt from the safety of their own homes.
Although we develop and use hundreds of digital services and tools in our business, following this outbreak we dug deep into our data to find out what technology is most relevant to collections teams and having the biggest impact on our clients’ customers.
Click here to find out more about how we utilise technology.
So how are we helping our clients through this Coronavirus pandemic?
Well since 70% of our monthly collections are taken through our self service portal and only 30% through the human collectors, we are actually best placed to serve our clients requirements here. Therefore, where we sit on panels, our clients have of course chosen to increase our allocations this month to ensure that as their other DCA’s teams are forced into self isolation, our self service portal can continue to collect money.
In fact our whole digital customer journey is set up to process through payments, answer basic questions, identify and probe for vulnerability but most of all, allow the customer to review, confirm and make payment for their debts. AI bots also support this journey so it’s possible to continue BAU in these very uncertain times. This sense of true contingency planning through digital tech has really helped our clients be able to deliver the continuous service they were craving.
So whilst in these times, we have lots of additional work, this is just one area CRS are supporting clients in making life as ‘normal’ as possible and retaining a cashflow within our clients’ businesses. Further more, we’ve looked at how we can offer this technological package and digital customer journey to new clients and we now have a solution in place we can bring live in less than 24 hours!
