Joining the data dots: building a real picture of your collections customer

Today, collections teams have more data at their disposal than ever before. But this information is really only the beginning of the story – because, on its own, data isn’t very smart. Individual facts about a customer’s spending or debts can tell us a little, but they can also lead us to make mistaken assumptions and wrong decisions if not viewed as a whole. Any debt collections professional knows, we need a way to connect the pieces of data, see them in context and build a complete profile of our customers to make the best decision. In other words, we need to use big data to see the bigger picture and take the appropriate actions.

To achieve this, it’s important to ensure your infrastructure is set up to deliver the kind of results that will be most useful to you obtaining your KPIs. The aim is to ensure that you and your team have a better view of what customers can realistically afford to repay and what their debt situation really looks like. Combining the data available along with the circumstances of an individual creates a single customer view. Having a single customer view can help you maximise income and increase efficiency within debt collection teams.

But how do you gain that single customer view? Several of our solutions can help you connect the dots and fill in a customer’s blanks. With so much data available, it’s easy to verify customer details once you know what you’re looking for – digitally gathered data, in particular, is useful to fill in gaps about young people who move around frequently. The overall result is an approach that lends itself much more to creating a ‘model’ of your customer, rather than simply looking at a checklist of scores and available facts. By building customer models, you’re more likely to identify which customers are at a higher risk of defaulting on payments and those that will repay their debts with a little patience and organisation.

In creating this customer model, rather than previously used guided or self-serve income and expenditure checklists, your team can verify the consolidated debt held by an individual. Combining this with the circumstances of an individual, your team is able to look at your debtor’s complete picture by assessing their earnings, expenditure and a consolidated view of debts. Your team members can then create a personalised debt recovery plan that is affordable, realistic and unique to a debtor’s situation.

Creating a unique payment plan will not only benefit the debtor but also the team by maximising the percentage of debt collected, reducing the need to write off unpaid debts. Your collections team will be able to allocate fewer resources to tracing and chasing debtors.

The single customer view will also lower the mis-tracing of debtors and the cost inefficiencies that accumulate with mis-tracing, ultimately increasing profit for the business. So, the question is, what’s stopping your business from moving to a personalised debt collection strategy that could improve efficiencies?

To find out more about how we can help you deliver a customer-centric strategy, take a look at our Collections solutions.