Why Should Collections Organisations Consider Speech Analytics?

Collections organisations are always looking for ways to improve contact centre collections revenue while reducing the compliance risk inherent in the debt-collection business.

Making mistakes and taking risks can cause reputational damage, hindering relationships and squandering opportunities – negatively impacting financial results. So, where is the most logical place to look for improvements? Look no further than your agents and the power of speech analytics.

Collections departments and organisations need to follow stringent government and state regulations when it comes to time windows for outbound call and the number of outbound calls placed – as well as meeting numerous other compliance standards. At the same time, they need to manage effective agent productivity to sustain a low-margin business.

Contact centre managers face many day-to-day challenges, from how to remain compliant to building efficiencies into the business in order to boost the bottom line. With so many responsibilities, how can contact centre managers be absolutely sure their agents flawlessly follow the script that has been set out? Will agents remember the training they received when first hired? Can managers realistically listen to recordings for more than just a small fraction of agent conversations, considering the scale of active calls? For most contact centres, the answer to these questions is typically “no.”

Interaction analytics for speech and text offers contact centre managers an important and valuable tool. By implementing speech analytics, a contact centre manager can easily monitor agent recordings to improve promise-to-pay rates and gross margins, while gaining a fuller perspective with insightful reporting and reviews. Along with improved revenue collections, contact centre managers can reduce risk while gaining greater control over compliance. By identifying compliance vulnerabilities through speech analytics, better customer service can be achieved by educating your agents.

Digital channels should be monitored and analysed via search, categorisation and automatic discovery, in order to help put more emphasis on customer interactions. Speech analytics is a vital solution for call centre and collection managers with a focus on debt collections, in order to optimise their customer service and increase positive customer interactions.

Relationships – Improve Customer and Agent Interactions

Understanding the nature and nuances of customer inbound calls is important; how effectively your agents interact with customers is key to improving their productivity and ensuring compliance. Speech analytics makes it simple for organisations to identify agents who need improvement, enabling them to focus efforts on building an enhanced, productive and compliant collections process.

For example, a contact centre manager can set up templates that look for the most prevalent weak spots, for example, agents needing to always state the mini-Miranda disclosure at the onset of the initial collections call. Agents are required to do this to identify themselves as callers from a debt-collection service, alerting customers to the fact that any information obtained is to be used for that purpose.

But the question may be, are agents fulfilling this obligation correctly and, therefore, are they compliant? By creating custom outbound campaigns, contact centre managers can remove any risk and simplify compliance efforts.

Financial Results – Drive Agent Productivity and Collections Performance

Ensuring agents always ask for a payment in full, or that they offer the highest settlement amount to debtors before lower ones, will help drive the collection process and improve contact centre profitability.

By monitoring usage of these and other critical collections skills, as well as precisely targeting agent training and coaching activities accordingly, speech analytics can dramatically increase collections revenue.