First Party collections done “virtual”
Do more with less. HOW? Try it – Virtually!
Virtual: The quality of having the attributes of something without sharing its (real or imagined) physical form.
Customer service—the key to any organization’s success. It promotes communication between you and your customers/clients and creates better relations. Yet, time and people resources are a precious, limited commodity, especially in today’s fast-paced world. By using IAT SmartDial’s CT Center site-premised system and/or CT Impact, our cloud dialing solution, it’s possible to tailor and customize your dialing strategies, thereby maximizing your resources.
Can a first-party collection organization use a dialer to collect virtually, without sacrificing quality and assurance? You can, and without adding more full time personnel to your staff. Virtual Agents are like having a shadow or mimicking your best producing agent. Utilizing a predictive dialer, your company will have a consistent and effective way to contact accounts.
A softer, but effective debt collection approach. If you are a 1st party debt collector, your approach as a company is typically softer than a 3rd party collections agency. When planning your dialing strategy, you must decide what steps are needed to contact your accounts with persistent consistency, without being obnoxious.
Use IVR messaging and automated reminder calls to stay in touch. When they call you back, route the call to the correct department and person/group.
- Leave friendly payment reminders. Plan your first reminders five to seven days prior to the due date. Leave past due reminders at the 30 day mark.
- Provide easy ways to make payments. Allow your customers to pay via check or credit card and schedule payments using the dialer.
- Leave thank you messages. Use the dialer to send any thank you messages you might want to convey appreciation to the customer.
When sending reminder calls, it’s important to determine the best person or group of people to take any inbound calls generated from your messages and then set up your dialer to route calls that way.
Skills-based routing allows CT Center (IAT’s site-premised dialer) to route each call to the most qualified group of agents. For instance, you may have a group of agents fluent in Spanish and another group designated to handle high-balance calls. If no agent in the group is immediately available, the call can be placed in a routing queue and transferred when an agent does become available.
If no agent becomes available in a specified amount of time, the routing queue can send calls to other backup groups in turn. It can also route calls to an IC (Interactive Communication) dialogue, transfer them to an IC Agent, transfer them to an operator extension or speak a message and hang up.
Tailor your virtual agent messages to the situation. IAT provides many different kinds of messages, including:
- Early Out/Pre-Collect, Pre-Due Payment Reminder
- Pay by Check or Credit Card, multiple payment options, with attendant transfer
- Simple Message, with Payment Options and with or without a transfer
- Inbound Blending, prompt for language
Virtual agents allow your organization to stay in touch with customers and collect the debt, without adding more personnel. IAT SmartDial’s CT Center site-premised and CT Impact cloud dialing can be tailored to fit your company’s dialer needs. Contact IAT to see how we can help you increase your bottom line.
This article was written by Mark