Get automated

The phone is still the most effective method for contacting people. When the issue is collecting outstanding debts, postal mail in combination with inbound and outbound calls can be effective for early-stage debtors, but as debt ages, the phone is the primary tool for getting promises from people to pay back what they owe.

Agents are productive when they're talking to people.

Fokion Natsis, Territory manager for Africa, Interactive Intelligence

Although manual dialling is still used to collect debt and is an appropriate method in some cases, an automated dialler, sometimes referred to as a “predictive dialler” or simply a “dialler”, provides a huge jump in productivity in collections.

Agents are productive when they're talking to people, although it's not uncommon for a debt collector to have to place 20 or more calls to get one actual debtor on the phone. This low contact rate, combined with dialling one number at a time, typically translates to low productivity - five to 15 minutes per hour talking to live people, and the rest spent unproductively dialling the phone, listening to the phone ring, and getting answering machines, wrong numbers, busy signals, etc.

By placing calls in parallel and focusing on delivering only live speakers to collectors, an automated dialler can make debt collectors many times more productive, with the collector actually talking to people 45 to 55 minutes each hour. In that sense, the phone is the most effective method for collecting debt, and automated dialling is the most effective method for using the phone to collect debt. However, utilising an automated predictive dialler doesn't always mean users are getting the most out of it. The difference between the normal use and effective use of an automated dialler is often the key competitive advantage for a collections operation.

There is an ongoing debate as to whether it is more effective to dedicate collectors to outbound dialling or to use blending to deliver inbound calls as well as automated outbound calls to collectors. Blending can be a very effective method for increasing debt liquidation rates.

Often, the negative perception of blending has more to do with prior experience with technology unable to effectively mix inbound and outbound calls. When inbound and outbound calls can be truly blended, and when the automated outbound system dynamically adjusts its dialling pace based on inbound load, blending makes sense.

Collections operations sometimes refer to inbound calls as “money calls”, because a debtor is calling them; therefore, effectively handling inbound calls is important. And because such inbound calls are as vital as outbound calls in the overall collections process, does it make sense to dedicate a group of top debt collectors to handle inbound calls? If so, how many collectors? What should those top debt collectors do when the inbound load is low? What about when there are more calls than they can handle? Should this overflow of money calls roll to customer service agents who are handling other, less high-priority types of inbound calls? Without blending, these and other questions must be answered.

With true blending, a collections operation can make optimal use of its best collectors by dialling aggressively when the inbound load is low, and by slowing down automated dialling as the inbound load increases. Routing inbound money calls to the best collectors will improve the bottom line.

What is the difference between an outbound collections call and an inbound collections call? After the initial introductions, isn't a collector having the same discussion whether they called the debtor or the debtor called them?

The phone is the most effective method for contacting people and collecting debt. An automated dialler is the most efficient use of agent time in using the phone to collect debt. Getting the most out of an automated dialler to collect debt requires understanding the capabilities of the dialler, paying attention to the details, combining appropriate technologies, and leveraging proven and new outbound dialling strategies.