In January 2019, AccountsRecovery.net launched a survey of more than 100 companies in the credit and collections industry to “assess the penetration of digital communication tools and how much they are being used in the industry.” “Digital communication” includes channels such as email, text messaging, and web portals that work to reach to consumers.
However, these channels are secondary to outbound calls and paper mail, practices that have remained unchanged for decades, even though 70% of companies believe that digital communications have had a moderate to significant impact on their collection rates! Updating these channels for the modern age can improve the collections experience for both the customer and collector. Let’s find out how!
Communication Channels
According to the AccountsRecovery survey, more than half of the companies that took part in the survey are using email communication. A majority of respondents also said that they are sending emails to or receiving emails from fewer than 20% of their users. This means that 80% or more of their customers are regularly receiving calls from collectors to discuss resolving their debts rather than receiving digital communications.
According to TrueAccord’s 2018 consumer survey, the majority of consumers using our site would rather resolve their debts online than through other channels. With such a large number of consumers interested in online engagement, it’s easy to see why we’ve leveraged digital channels to modernize the collections industry.
We use email communication as our primary form of contact at every stage of the customer lifecycle, and each message is customized for the individual.
Mobile and Text Messages
The prevalence of smartphones has made reaching out to users on their mobile devices an effective and essential channel for communicating with customers. Unfortunately, only 21.6% of collection companies are actively using text messaging as part of their outreach strategy! Even some of the largest agencies in the industry are only texting about ¼ of their customers.
More than 65% of companies in the collections space that are not currently using text messaging as a channel are concerned about two things: a fear of being sued or not fully understanding what is and is not allowed of them.
TrueAccord has taken steps to directly address these issues by hard-coding compliance parameters directly into our system, so we are able to securely reach our users where they are: on their phones. In fact, more than 85% of our web traffic comes from smartphones and tablets, and we are able to drive traffic to the right pages through push notifications on those devices. These notifications serve the same purpose as text messaging but are uniquely catered to that specific customer’s needs.
Web Portals
Portals and landing pages created for consumers should be exactly that: designed with them in mind. The vast majority of companies in the collections space have portals specifically designed for customers to manage their accounts, but 75% of those companies report remarkably low engagement through those pages.
Creating an engaging portal means answering the question: “How can we make the experience personalized for the customer?” TrueAccord embraces this in its design methodology; Shannon Brown, TrueAccord’s Product Design Manager, says that “we’re not pushing offers to them, we’re looking for information [about the nature of their debt] to customize for their needs.” Our design embraces our mission of giving consumer’s control of their financial health.
You can learn all about TrueAccord’s design philosophy by listening to our full interview with Shannon here!
By focusing on developing interconnected, customized content that reaches users through multiple channels, we can reach consumers via email and mobile push notifications with the goal of bringing them back to our website.
The debt collection industry at large has a long way to go to meet consumer expectations about financial services. Our machine learning algorithm optimizes which message to a customer to send on what channel, addressing those expectations and letting users manage their debt at their own pace. This is also why we work to provide our users with as much visibility into their debt as possible through easily accessible digital channels.