Tag: contact channels

What is email deliverability and why does it matter to collections?

By on April 16th, 2020 in Product and Technology

Without the ability to successfully deliver your collection emails to a consumer’s inbox, email cannot be a successful collection method for your agency.  Email deliverability is the measure of the ability to successfully deliver an email to a user’s inbox. It is perhaps the most relevant KPI in an email-first digital collection strategy.  Several factors can influence whether or not your emails even reach people including spam filters, sending times and volume, and even the content of the message itself.

Want to learn more about building a scalable email strategy? Check out these tips from our team of deliverability experts!

A high deliverability rate then means that you are creating the right content, sharing it at the right time, and engaging your consumers. By measuring engagement through clicks, you can combine these statistics with an online payment portal to create an easily-tracked customer journey to payment without ever picking up the phone. 

Pivoting to tracking deliverability rates, clicks, online payment totals, and payment plans created creates a full digital ecosystem of KPIs with better engagement than traditional call-to-collect models. Here are a few tips for making email an effective part of your collections strategy.

Borrow email metrics from marketing experts

Our own email deliverability experts have years of experience working in the digital marketing space. KPIs like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates aren’t just for marketing teams working on generating leads, they can offer insight into the effectiveness of your collections efforts and help you understand whether or not you’re actually reaching your consumers. 

Tracking deliverability rates, clicks, online payment totals, and payment plans created creates a full digital ecosystem of KPIs with better engagement than traditional call-to-collect models. This is a lot of data to keep track of, and digital debt collection tools can provide some assistance in tracking digital and other tracking performance data. 

Emails also don’t depend on urgency in the same way that phone calls do. Customers appreciate the convenience of managing their finances on their own time (25% of our customers access their accounts outside of the call hours designated of 8am-9pm by the TCPA). Analyzing open rates for different send times provides a deeper understanding of when your consumers like to be reached.

Email marketing metrics not only accomplish the same goals as more traditional call-based KPIs, but you also have an even clearer vision of your collections performance.

Authenticate and build domain reputation 

Email authentication allows ISPs (Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, etc.) to properly identify an email’s sender. Any time an email is sent to and reaches a consumer, you are representing your company’s brand and reputation with that email. The actual process of email authentication requires the implementation of several authentication standards:

Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

This allows the owner of a domain to determine which servers their emails are sent from.

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

DKIM is an encryption system that allows the email sender to claim responsibility for a message. That encrypted information can then be verified by the ISP. 

Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC)

This standard (and policy-making organization) further expands on these and adds linkage to the author (“From:”) domain name to improve and monitor the protection of the domain from fraudulent email. The DMARC organization continues to update policies related to domain security.

Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI)

BIMI helps users to identify brands based on images included alongside their emails. Consider them an email preview profile picture to help users immediately recognize the email’s sender.*

*In order to integrate BIMI, you must have the other three standards mentioned here established first.

Interested in learning more about these standards? The Validity blog has a great series on SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for you to read here! 

An authenticated domain helps to boost your domain reputation. If your send domain (the part of an email address after the @ sign) has a poor reputation, it is more likely to be relegated to a user’s spam inbox. Taking the proper steps to build authentication standards can secure your reputation against a massive hurdle that you’ll encounter otherwise. 

Validate and increase RPC rates

Email validation is the process of ensuring that the emails you are sending to are valid and deliverable. Where authentication focuses on establishing your own email domains, validation verifies whether or not the consumer email addresses that you have on file are valid emails. 

Sending an email to a non-existent email address will cause the email to bounce; you will receive a notice that the email could not successfully be delivered. A high bounce rate from emailing too many invalid users will be perceived by ISPs as poor list management—a common practice of batch email scammers—and your sender reputation will be damaged and your deliverability will drop.

In the digital collections world, sending to valid email addresses is also directly related to your right party contact rate. By validating your email lists, you can quickly identify which of your consumers have valid contact information in your system. With this information on hand, you can directly reach out to those that do, build your domain reputation, and learn which of your customers you’ll have to reach out to for updated information.

Not every traditional debt collection agency is using email extensively, but it is an invaluable tool in the age of digital communication. Understanding the technical aspects of email deliverability and the challenges that come with properly scaling your digital communications will help you overcome contact hurdles that are more challenging now than ever before.

Are you ready to build a future-proofed digital collections strategy? Get in touch with our team to learn what we can do to help.

4 reasons companies worry about digital debt collection

By on March 26th, 2020 in Industry Insights

Committing to work with a collections agency can help to reduce the strain of losses on your business. Whether you’re an eCommerce platform with mounting chargebacks, a small lender, or a rapidly growing bank, working with the right collection agency can reshape how you manage delinquent payments. 

Some digital debt collection options also offer self-service products or platforms that allow companies to manage their collections efforts with an internal team supported by powerful, digital tools while other digital companies offer full-service collections.

No matter how you (or your collection agency partner) choose to collect, there are pros and cons to different approaches, and the newness of digital debt collection can create some cause for concern. It’s important to be informed and understand how digital debt collection can help you and actually directly combats many of the risks associated with collections.

“There’s a compliance risk”

Debt collection is a tightly regulated industry and in order to collect debts safely, companies have to conduct extensive training and build processes that adhere to those regulations. This includes federal laws like the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), and any legislation passed through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regarding collections practices. Regulations on collections also vary broadly at the state-level. 

With all of these regulations in mind, companies that are beginning their debt collection efforts may be wary of investing in an extensive, internal infrastructure and will instead partner with established third-party debt collection agencies. Several digital debt collection platforms and tools have built-in compliance measures, but they still require internal teams to manage. With the proper systems in place, however, they can be used to great effect as they are coded to align with legal compliance measures. 

TrueAccord’s legal leadership team has been in the industry for decades. You can check out some of our legal advocacy work here and here!

Full-scale digital debt collection agencies take this a step further and are able to provide comprehensive debt collection services with built-compliance software alongside technology experts that manage the product for you. With measurable digital channels taking priority over agent calls, compliance fixes are integrated into every communication, no training required.

“This will impact how we talk to consumers”

Traditional collections agencies are driven by a call-to-collect model of business that leans on agents calling consumers. The collections industry has remained largely unchanged in its practices for decades, but consumer preferences have shifted. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to reach consumers over the phone; in fact, in the State of Collection 2019 report, one industry leader included in the survey said that “right-party contact has fallen off a cliff.” 

Transitioning to digital debt collection from traditional models is easier than you might think. Want to learn more about how easy it can be? Get in touch with us.

In order to meet the growing demand for convenient communication methods, digital debt collection strategies are redefining the industry’s approach to connecting with consumers in debt. While this digital transition will have a lasting impact on the collections industry, companies looking to start or change their collections strategy have the opportunity to work with partners that are embracing the change. 

“Setting up new technology takes time”

Implementing new processes always takes time. Using a traditional call-to-collection agency still requires building a business partnership and sharing debt portfolios for agents to begin working accounts. In the digital debt collection world, implementation can begin quickly and is made easier by uploading CSV files of contact information directly to the online platforms and applications.

Using internal digital tools can also cause delays due to the need for introducing agents and other team members to the system and allocating training time and resources to building infrastructure. Full-service digital-first collections agencies are able to merge the simplicity of starting with a digital strategy with the value of a dedicated team built specifically to manage these new processes. 

“We aren’t ready to bring on a new tool or partner right now”

Timing can be a blocker for any number of company decisions. Collections and recovery may be a year-round function, but teams still see a seasonal ebb and flow in payment rates. Trying to adopt a completely new strategy in the middle of a busy tax season, for example, can feel like a gamble. Or maybe you’re in the middle of a major acquisition or change in leadership and the business’ future is uncertain.

Even in times of change, it’s important to understand that digital collections tools perform better over time than traditional collections agencies. By beginning your digital approach sooner, even with a small subset of accounts, you can begin to compare digital efforts directly to other collections partners.

Comparing digital-first agencies and tools directly to traditional competitors on the market helps to illustrate the power of digital infrastructure on contact rates. The sooner you start, the sooner you can ramp up, and the sooner you can collect. 

Digital debt collection may be new, but that newness only serves to improve existing systems. Companies that depend on traditional collections efforts can see substantial growth in outreach using digital channels, and those that are not yet collecting have more opportunities to get started now than ever before. Future-proof your company’s losses, improve recovery rates, and keep your customers happy all at the same time. 

Connect with our team today to learn more about how digital debt collection is changing the industry for the better.

How do you effectively contact consumers in debt?

By on January 14th, 2020 in User Experience

According to the State of Collection 2019 report published by TransUnion and the Aite Group, “the challenge at the top of thought leaders’ minds [is] the increasing difficulty of connecting with consumers in a world where robocalls and scams run rampant.”

Consumers today are less and less likely to answer a call from a phone number that they do not recognize (only about 47% of calls are answered if the number isn’t saved), and the industry has to adjust if it wants to keep its head above water. 

One industry leader included in the survey said that “right-party contact has fallen off a cliff,” and for many debt collectors, the future feels bleak. In fact, three-quarters of those surveyed by TransUnion believe that upcoming regulatory changes from the CFPB will be difficult for them to implement into their business. 

This can all feel like a death knell for collections and recovery, but there is hope! Industry thought leaders believe that new communication channels and methods hold the future for the industry, and companies that are beginning the adoption process have already seen promising results!

A collection revolution

To get ahead of the curve, collection firms “are trying to understand people better and get the right data,” reports a third-party collections leader. Revolutions begin when the people rise up, or in this case, when they stop picking up. Looking at customer communication preferences, the world has largely gone digital, but “few [collections industry] respondents report their initial contact is attempted via email (3%).” 

So what are the new channels driving collections forward? How do you communicate with consumers more effectively as the age of call and collect fades? The importance of digital forms of communication can’t be overstated. 61% of agencies surveyed are already using email to communicate in some form with another 22% looking to add it to their strategy in the next two years. SMS & text messaging only has a 16% adoption rate with another 53% interested in further expanding. 

While there is power in alternative forms of communication, at the end of the day whether you’re using email, text, direct drop voicemails, or messages tucked inside candy wrappers to communicate with customers, the tool is only as effective as its ability to reach the consumer at the right place and the right time.

Moving into a digital future

With the start of a new decade, it makes more sense than ever before to shift toward a digital collection strategy to properly contact consumers in debt. One of the most difficult hurdles of integrating a digital approach for collections isn’t simply starting to send emails or text messages, it is integrating these digital channels at scale for hundreds to thousands of consumers.

This means that the solution to effectively contacting consumers as collections continues to evolve comes from a combination of understanding performance data, navigating the complexities of email deliverability, and learning to recognize and adapt to consumer preferences.

It’s no wonder that so many companies feel unprepared for the coming changes at a systemic level. Getting started and preparing for change with the right collector today can mean your collections strategy continues to grow for years to come.

Ready to go digital? Let our team know!