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A recent study undertaken by L.E.K consulting has highlighted the key challenges and factors for success in the modern-day collections industry.

Coeo is a technology-driven debt collection service provider with a consumer-centric and highly automated approach to business. According to L.E.K, the success of pioneers in the debt collection industry can be attributed to a high degree of automation, including the use of chat and mail bots, with the use of artificial intelligence quickly becoming one of the more vital aspects of the collections process.

L.E.K went on to state that a high level of customer service can only be found from industry leaders like coeo. Finally, technology-oriented players like coeo are among the best suited to achieve the goals set out by the new generation of clients, especially those in the buy now pay later space.

Read the full article here:
https://www.lek.com/insights/ei/europes-debt-collection-managers-must-respond-new-tech-led-competitors

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Choosing the right solution for you… Our team at coeo are here to help. We’ve built our business by helping clients solve any issue they have with either their internal or external collections functions. 

In this blog post we’ll give you a quick look behind the curtains at the scope of our services as well as sharing two real world examples of how our clients have enjoyed success working with our industry leading teams.   

Here at coeo, we have 4 main services that span the full debt lifecycle, they are:

1. White Label 

2. Collections

3. AJJB Law

4. coeo Compass

Here’s a little more detail…

1. White Label: Our White Label service is often used as a replacement or compliment to an internal collections team. Creating a well-defined process based on variable costs per success rather than a fixed cost model. 

2. Collections: When the time is right to outsource to a Collections agency, we believe you should use the best. We are consistently at the top of panels and are flexible in our approach and timescales to fit in with what’s right for you. 

3. AJJB Law: Our sister company AJJB Law is used for cases that have exhausted internal and external collections processes, they’re experts in the legal field.

4. coeo Compass: Finally there’s coeo Compass, our specialist vulnerable customer team that help with those who need a little extra attention.

So, how can you use our services?

Well, flexibility is key. We have clients that’ll use a single service, and we have clients that use the full range, from white label all the way through to legal and collections. What’s most important is that the process is right for you.

Although theory is great, real life case studies are always more powerful, so here’s two examples that bring what we do to life. 

Case study 1

First up, we helped find a solution for a financial services client who was having headaches from their internal team.

Recruitment and staff management was an issue; the company was growing and so were the number of bad debts. 

Their internal process was strong for the first 7 days, but the remainder tired as the team (rightly so) focused on the newer defaults with more chance of rehabilitation. 

Accounts had to be returned for outsource after four missed payments days, due to contractual obligations elsewhere leading to defaults happening during this time. 

Our white label service was the perfect fit here, we provided the client with:

• A well-defined procedure that was based on variable costs per success rather than a fixed cost model. 

• Accounts were passed to us after the internal team had exhausted their intense early arrears procedures. 

• Escalations, such as notifying the customer of default processes, were included in communications. 

The outcome:

• A more flexible, cost-effective solution, versus expanding the internal team. 

• Better collections rates at later stages of the early arrears process.

• Higher customer engagement, customers were responding to the personalised communications that explained where they were in the ‘journey’.

Case study 2

Another client, in the utilities sector, wanted a full end-to-end process for their ended (or lost) commercial accounts. We deployed three stages, White Label, Collections and finally legal through AJJB Law.

They were provided with:

• Better MI, through our MI Site.

• An automated end-to-end collections process; no more manual pulls for data. 

• Performance statistics through our MI site in a clear, easy to understand format. 

• And finally, no black holes: accounts wouldn’t get ‘lost’ in the system as they were doing before. 

So, there you have it, a couple of quick examples of how we at coeo embrace collections services that work by offering the correct solution for our clients.

Speak to us today about our services and, specifically, how we can help you. 

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For those of you who don’t already know, we’re thrilled to announce that we are rebranding to coeo! With CRS joining the coeo group late last year, this change in branding was the logical move. 

Joining the coeo group opened up a world of new possibilities for us, and we can’t wait to see what the future has in store. We understand this may cause some uncertainty or prompt you to have some questions, so we have prepared a small FAQ below that will hopefully bring you up to speed!

Will our services change?

No, we still offer the same services, and they operate in exactly the same way.

What happens to AJJB law?

Nothing, AJJB will still be serving the same purpose and operating in the same manner as it does currently.

Will my account manager change?

No, you will be dealing with the same people as you do now.

When will this take place?

For our clients, we will be running dual branding throughout April, and from the 1st of May, we will be operating as coeo. For your customers, please refer to the point below.

What will change for your customers?

For the moment… Absolutely nothing! Our customer-facing portals and contact are still branded as CRS and will be until at least Q3 2022 (We will announce an exact changeover date and in-depth plan in the coming months). When the time comes to change over to coeo on the customer side, any customers that have already had contact from CRS will continue to deal with us in CRS branding. For customers that start receiving contact after the changeover date, they will be contacted with coeo branding and a coeo payment portal.

What will happen to client contracts?

Coeo is just a change in trading name, new contracts should not be required as Credit Resource Solutions still exists as the legal entity. Any new contracts will mention CRS trading as coeo, but for any existing contracts; there is no need for changes to be made.

Who are coeo?

Founded in 2010, the coeo Group is now one of Europe’s most successful debt collection service providers. The company has branches in Dormagen, Krefeld, Vienna and Rotterdam, currently processing 185 million euros’ worth of claims each year in four countries and has over 420 employees. The majority of coeo’s customers are large companies operating in the retail and e-commerce, finance and insurance, energy supply and mobility as well as telecommunications sectors.

You can find out more about the group here: https://www.coeo-group.com/en 

How do I get in contact with you?

Your existing contact methods will continue to work, we will start operating from new email addresses, but anything sent to existing inboxes will be forwarded onto the new equivalent – so you have nothing to worry about!

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We have some exciting news – the UK’s premier recoveries agency (us!) joins the coeo group of companies.

Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Germany, coeo is the leading group of collections businesses across Europe. 

With shared aims around the advancement of applied technology and a customer-first philosophy, we add ‘another string to our bow’ by offering pan-European collections.

Talk to us today about how we can help improve your collections strategy either internationally or right here in the UK. 

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At coeo our specialist insurance collections teams are experienced in designing and deploying a full suite of compliant end-to-end services, we can help with any stage of the collections cycle, whether it be MTC’s or DD rehabilitation. Find our more here.

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At coeo our specialist B2B collections teams have been hard at work over the past ten years developing state of the art digital collections solutions that work hand in hand with traditional practices. Find our more here.

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Here at coeo we enjoy years of telecommunications experience and a full suite of compliant end-to-end services, meaning whether lost or live we can help with any stage of the Telco collections cycle.  Find our more here.

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Thanks for taking the time to read through this blog. As a business that measures itself on the phrase ‘Collections Solutions that Work’ we believe the services we provide need to make impact on our clients’ customers so we keep them at the centre of our decision making.

Download our whitepaper on leveraging customer feedback; Packed with why it’s important, what channels your team can use and examples of how we’ve actioned feedback into success.

Our company has evolved at an astonishing pace over the past few years and driving that change has been the realisation that the best way to adapt to our clients’ needs is to listen more and talk less. A corner stone of our growth has been to identify trends from the feedback and data we have access to and to move quickly to execute change.

As discussed in our leveraging customer feedback whitepaper, our Continuous Improvement Process (CIP) has been designed to help us evolve our services with the ever-changing nature of customer trends. This is especially relevant to our digital services. Our system works by pooling information from our [top 8 feedback channels] to supply our strategic research and development teams so they can identify opportunities for improvement and from that create solutions.

Ideas are mapped out (we have a policy there are no bad ideas) and then we run feasibility tests on paper. Once the activities have passed benchmarking, they’re developed then integrated into our processes, programmes and systems and then handed over to our product owners, and finally the customers. Although we have developed our CIP to approach our R&D in a considered and measured way, we also know our execution teams need to be robust and flexible enough to move quickly when necessary.

In this blog we share with you 4 examples of how we’ve used the Continuous Improvement Programme to make changes that have worked for both customers and clients alike:

1. Customers making payment minutes after highlighting an issue
2. Report a bug
3. People anxious to address
4. Vulnerability

Customers making payment minutes after highlighting an issue

There have been many instances where customers have reported issues via email, webchats and phone call. With simple technical fixes we make it a rule to try and find a solution within 24 hours. Our feedback loop enables these issues to be received by agents, reported to strategic leaders and managers, then passed to our inhouse web development team highlighting the issue and the solutions that needs to be put in place. We’ve then re-engaged with these customers, apologised for any inconvenience and encourage the customer to go on and make payment again where possible, all done within 24 hours. This removal of obstacles, along with the follow-up activity, not only shows customers that we’re listening to them, but also ensures effective solutions are reached as quickly as possible. Reviews are being conducted on a regular basis which enables us to have a clear process in reporting issues and putting fixes in place to create a seamless process in solving issues.

Report a bug issue

We like this story as it’s quite ironic. A customer got in contact with us regarding our ‘Report a bug’ button being so enlarged on a mobile device; it was dominating the screen. The tool that we were using to find ‘bugs’ was actually being ‘buggy’. Our web development team immediately jumped on this, implementing the change required and the customer then went on to make payment within minutes.

People anxious to address issues

On a more serious note, addressing outstanding balances can easily be understood as a sensitive and personal matter for customers, with some often reluctant to engage via phone call. Our feedback channels kept pointing us towards a growing trend of customers desiring to move away from the traditional collections’ method of call centres. Following our feedback channels, we realised the solution was to develop contact payment channels relevant to the customer’s needs; our Customer Portal was born. So, we invested heavily in developing software and programmes that allow customers to manage their own accounts and offer them a level of control never previously enjoyed in the Collections industry before. This actually led to customers contacting us after dealing with their debts, thanking us for the multiple options they had to see what they owed, why it was owed and putting measures in place to address it.

Find out WHY feedback is important to your collections and what channels are best to gather feedback: just download our FREE whitepaper on leveraging customer feedback HERE!

Vulnerability

Our approach to vulnerable customers remains paramount and feedback from this consumer group provides valuable insight, helping us to make sure our TCF and vulnerability processes are running effectively. Our data is telling us vulnerability is on the rise and there has been an increase of vulnerable customers of nearly 650% over the past five years. When communicating with vulnerable customers it’s important you have the mechanisms capable of identifying or ‘flagging’ these customers, so they’re redirected to the correct support. We feel it’s important to integrate both digital and in-house expertise to ensure these customers receive suitable responses and are sign posted to the best possible support, so they can clear their accounts sensitively. Let’s look into the ways in which coeo have implemented changes as a result of feedback and examine some examples of how our technology helps support vulnerable clients.

Introducing CRiS

CRiS is our autoresponder webchat bot accessible to customers through our customer portal. CRiS is on hand to direct and signpost customers around their portal and answer a host of portal related questions. We understand that some queries concern complicated matters that cannot be answered by a chatbot. In the case of vulnerable customers CRiS is programmed to identify keywords in the chat such as: depression, anxiety and panic attack. When this is flagged CRiS will provide a friendly message to the customer informing them that the chat will be transferred to a specialist agent. Our trained agents then receive the conversation transcript and can immediately begin helping the customer. The customer’s account will also be flagged as vulnerable, ensuring all staff are aware of this vulnerability so that, if the customer opts to use another contact method, our agents are aware of the customer’s circumstances.

Introducing CriSe

With the development and continued success of CRiS we turned our attention to other channels where we could utilise the programming to help develop the customer experience capabilities, and CriSe, our email bot was born. Our feedback loop and findings recognised an increase is queries coming in via email, once again looking to address their debt digitally rather than in person via the phone. CRiSe has the same in-house programming as CRiS and is able to handle simple queries, along with identifying and flagging vulnerability. Both of these bots have a ‘learning’ system, where commonly asked questions are recognised and further macros can be created by our R&D teams to increase the number of queries that can be answered.

Let’s finish on a happy note!

The ability of our digital developments to allow customers to take back control of their debt has seen a positive surge in both net promoter ratings with clients and positive feedback from customers. CRiS has received a number of positive comments and we thought we’d share a few as a great way to finish this whitepaper on a happy note:

• “Love being able to sort debt this way, it’s so much easier! Great website.”
• “I like that this can be done online without having an awkward chat with someone.”
• “Awesome website. Took 2 minutes to log in and set up an arrangement.”

Want to know more? Here’s our Tech & Services brochure

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Data analysis can often feel overwhelming if you’re unsure of what you are looking for. There’s a danger and concern that if the data is not read correctly you can lead your organisation down an incorrect path.

Experience is crucial for strategic decision making. We start with the anecdotal feedback and combine it with hard data, identify customer issues or blockages, then develop tactics to deal with them and run tests to measure their feasibility, we call it the Continuous Improvement Process (CIP).

Our strategic R&D teams now enjoy the benefit of acquiring years of experience in our customer feedback and design loop and deploy both sophisticated and simply designed processes to create our customer engagement improvements.

As an example, this year alone we’ll service over 2 million live customer accounts and monthly enjoy circa 213k inbound customer contacts, and it’s this volume and its exponential growth combined with our CIP that feeds our customer engagement evolution.

coeo UK in action: identifying trends

A simple tool we use is a software programme which aggregates the most commonly used words and phrases within our top 8 customer feedback channels to offer us a broad view of common issues.

We use this software to crawl through the conversation transcripts, clustering key information into word clouds as a part of our research and data analysis.

A welcome bonus is at the moment we’re enjoying the fruits of our ‘digital’ labour as the word clouds are often describing comments like ‘quick service’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘easy’ by customers commending our digital approach.

Obviously shifts in customer trends or software problems will cluster as negative words in the clouds which we see as an opportunity for development.

This feedback over the years has led to incredible collection developments like the implementation of autoresponders, live chat, and our bespoke customer portal where customers can query debts, address their balances, ask questions and set up payment arrangements helping them to have greater control of their own account.

Implementing feedback into action

Over the years we’ve developed a range of improvements based on customer trends and the CIP loop. Here are four examples of how the data has resulted in positive change for our services and and our clients’ return on investment.

In this blog we share 4 critical ways direct customer feedback has led to our collections growth:

1. Going digital
2. Payments
3. Devices
4. Accessibility 

Let’s take a closer look…

Going digital

We all know a call centre team can sometimes be impractical, so why wouldn’t we provide a digital option for customers to manage their own account via an online portal?

Out of hours visits to our website show many people don’t want to discuss important matters during the normal working day.

A common question we had to ask ourselves early in our feedback strategy was: “how do we handle matters concerning our services at a time convenient to the customer?”

This gave birth to the constant review and development of our digital services: platforms that could offer access and answers to queries.

Therefore, it is essential for us, and other companies, to provide an online presence to give customers opportunities to handle outstanding matters 24/7 with no limitations on time or place.

Payments

10-15 years ago, most ad-hoc payments were made by cash or cheque and regular payments were simply made by direct debits and/or standing orders.

As a company built on the traditional foundations of the Collections industry, we still maintain these regular payment methods for that ever-shrinking market who prefer them. One-off payments, have however, considerably evolved with the introduction of digital wallets, PayPal, GooglePay and ApplePay.

A real success story has been our implementation, a number of years ago of PayPal, into our customer portal: MyCRS. Payments have increased via this method by 130% over the last twelve months and continues to rise at a substantial rate.

Whenever a customer has asked if we accept payments through a method we don’t currently offer, we immediately put this on the table internally and review the implementation of this method. This enhances our digital approach and ensures payments from customers are as convenient as possible.

Devices

Over 82% of customer payments are now made on a mobile, therefore it’s paramount that our mobile payment channels are easy-to-follow and use and have full functionality.

Our focus for a number of years was optimising accessibility on mobile phones and tablets and reviewing the data to understand the quickly changing habits of our portal visitors.

Whilst the payments coming from mobile phones have been increasing, only a little over 1% of our payments received are now made by tablet (information based on early 2020 stats). This has dropped from a massive 15% only 12 months earlier!

It’s essential that our App and website moves with the times, and customer feedback plays a huge part in developing new plans for devices.

Accessibility

One of the most frequent feedback issues received from our clients’ customers in a wide range of sectors including Insurance, Credit Finance, Utilities, Debt Recovery etc. is customers being abroad and alleging they cannot make payment.

More and more companies are now making it clearer on their websites and communications the options available to pay while outside of the country.

The move from the Highstreet to online purchasing has developed a digitally literate marketplace where online payments have become second nature and trusted.

Our feedback loop and analysis has shown that we have received payments from 6 out of the 7 continents in the last 3 months – access being available worldwide! We even analyse international conversion rates, with Australia having the highest conversion rate from login to successful payment.

Particularly for debt collection, customers’ ability to login online and manage their accounts from anywhere in the world is key to the, being able to keep up with their repayments where otherwise, detriment may be caused by their account falling further into the Collections cycle.

Final Words from coeo

Our company has evolved at an astonishing pace over the past few years and driving that change has been the realisation that the best way to adapt to our clients’ needs is to listen more and talk less.

That is why we developed our in-house ‘Continuous Improvement Process’ to leverage the incredible feedback we gather and use.

To find out what different channels your team can use and further examples of how we’ve actioned feedback into direct success download our whitepaper on leveraging customer feedback.