Rising delinquency rates continue to pressure financial institutions of all sizes. Many teams respond by adding new tactics, hiring more staff, or investing in updated systems. These efforts are often...
Collections
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3 min read
Financial institutions always work to enhance their collections strategies, an essential tool for maintaining healthy cash flow and minimizing risk. Many institutions must make a critical decision about employing digital methods or live agents for their collections processes. Both approaches offer distinct advantages, and various factors need to be considered. This article will outline three crucial factors to consider when making this important choice.
1. Engaging with Live Agent Collection
Live agents provide an invaluable service by delivering personalized assistance tailored to each client's needs. Even in the face of scalability challenges, increasing staff through effective hiring and training enables better support for handling growing call volumes. Having live agents allows callers to:
- have more meaningful conversations.
- negotiate payment plans.
- address complex inquiries.
2. Maximizing the Digital Approach
Automated collections processes offer the benefit of consistent and round-the-clock availability, increasing efficiency and saving costs to ensure the system can handle a large volume of accounts with minimal human intervention. When the system is capable of managing accounts effectively without substantially raising operational expenses, it becomes more scalable and economical to:
- send out payment reminders.
- generate automated calls.
- initiate email communications.
3. Customizable Messaging
When deciding between digital and live agents for collections in the financial services industry, it's important to weigh the options carefully. Both have advantages and disadvantages when optimizing your financial institution's efficiency, customer experience, compliance, and cost-effectiveness. Finding a balance between the two may be the most effective solution to:
- offer a tailored and all-inclusive strategy for debt retrieval.
- boost the efficiency of debt collection.
- meet the diverse needs of customers and regulatory requirements.
When deciding whether to have your collections process live, automated, or a combination of both, it's important to carefully weigh the factors of efficiency, customer experience, compliance, and cost-effectiveness.
By combining automation with live agents, collections teams can offer a personalized and thorough approach to debt recovery. This improves the collection process's effectiveness while meeting members' diverse needs and regulatory requirements.
Preferred CollectTM is SWBC’s comprehensive managed service for outsourced collections. SWBC’s solution enables credit unions to use a self-service portal for an automated strategy, a live-agent strategy, or a blended solution that leverages the best of both worlds: a digital-first approach and the use of compliance-trained live agents. The Preferred CollectTM automated and blended solutions, integrated with FICO’s omnichannel communication software, allow for easy and convenient resolutions of past-due loan payments and the deployment of best practices communication strategies.
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