Introduction
The digital financial services sector has experienced a boom in the last decade, where individuals can get financing from lending institutions from their mobile devices.
The proliferation of mobile-based banking and lending platforms has provided unbanked populations with access to financial services and increased financial inclusion by over 50%. Digital lending, which provides people with easy access to loans of various amounts, has been prevalent, and there are now over 120 digital lending platforms in Kenya.
A study conducted by the Digital Lenders Association of Kenya in 2019, showed that 71% of over 4,000 total respondents reached had taken out a mobile loan in the past 6 months.
However, with the ease at which individuals can access funds, it is becoming increasingly harder for the companies offering this service to collect both efficiently and effectively. The findings of a recent household survey by the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK), FSD Kenya, and the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) shows that 50.9% of the respondents have defaulted on their mobile loans.
The Challenge
The debt collection industry faces various communication challenges in the post-COVID-19 economy. They include:
Increase in mobile borrowers: With the surge in borrowers, the collection industry has failed to keep up with the technologically advanced mobile generation of today. Research indicates that most borrowers or indebted population depend on mobile devices as they are on the go, but the industry has not been able to optimize debt collection policies in tandem with this growing trend. The customer experience ultimately suffers and creates problems for debt collection agents to recover the loan amount.
Collection Methods Are Not Real-Time: One of the major roadblocks in the process of debt recovery is the absence of real-time collaboration between the borrower and the collector. Each debtor’s repayment abilities are unique due to differences such as their financial background, requiring a collector to create customized collection plans. Infrequent and breakdown in communication only results in a long, complicated, and incomplete collection process that also hinders collectors from offering a smooth customer experience.
Too Many Calls: Due to the industry-wide recovery policies followed, collection agents end up calling debtors at odd intervals and times, which leaves debtors often complaining of feeling harassed.
Contacting Wrong People: Many times collectors end up calling debtors who have long paid off their debts, just because their records are not updated for the same. In-efficient collection processes on the part of collection agents lead to the wastage of precious time of both collectors and debtors.
Lack of Tools: It is not all debtors that turn bad, most of them are capable of paying back their dues with just a little hand-holding like offering assistance or motivating them properly. However, most debt collection agents are not provided with appropriate tools to analyze customers in the right manner, as they are not equipped with the right tools to help them to view debtors as customers during the recovery process.
The Solution
In order to solve the pain points of the collection industry, taking advantage of modern collection systems and processes is inevitable.
A cloud telephony solution is one such communication solution that can assist debt collectors to modernize their collection activities in a convenient and scalable way. Cloud-based telephony solutions are a powerful and quickly deployable tool to boost collections.
What is Cloud Telephony?
Cloud telephony is a phone system that runs through your internet connection. Commonly referred to as a Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP-based hosted PBX solution. The solution assists you to move your business phone service to the cloud. This enables businesses to make and receive calls via a phone number without the need for a physical call center or sophisticated phone hardware.
What are the benefits of introducing a cloud call center for your collection's needs?
If you’re debating the switch from an on-premise call center to a cloud call center solution, here is why you should upgrade.
Reduced costs: Moving your call center infrastructure to the cloud can reduce costs for maintenance, upgrades, and data usage.
Easy deployment: It is a top-tier solution that can be quickly and easily deployed. While conventional call infrastructure needs to be physically deployed, cloud solutions can be installed offsite in minutes.
Customizable solution: A cloud call center platform can be customized to your company’s needs. You can scale support during heavy call periods and reduce it when necessary.
Integratable with external systems: cloud-based call infrastructure can be easily integrated with your existing software, making the transition frictionless.
Performance analysis: Department heads can easily compare collection rates between different teams or agents. In addition, supervisors can even listen to live calls to monitor agent performance and identify issues with their service delivery in order to improve their customer satisfaction whilst improving their collection efforts.
How Mteja’s cloud call center solution can assist your business to boost its collections rates.
Mteja offers a ready-made cloud call center service, aimed at abstracting away the complexities of telephony systems, allowing businesses to effortlessly engage their clients over calls by enabling them to run infinitely scalable call centers on the cloud with zero technical knowledge.
Our cloud telephony solution would allow you access to various functionalities that would help you maximize your collection activities, such as:
Automatic Call Management: Make calls to your customers and keep a close eye on operations. Integrate a softphone into your CRM software to initiate calls with a single click through a Click to Call function.
Advanced Reporting Options: Keep track of important KPIs over an analytics dashboard. See all the important information on a beautiful and convenient dashboard.
Integrate With Credit Management Software: Agents can see customer information on their screen during each call in real-time, this makes each call more personal and effective.
Call recording: You can record your calls to have evidence of payment agreements and essential information on each contact. You can also use the recordings to monitor the quality of service to your customers.
Document the call details: Agents can write notes during the call about customer interactions in real-time. This will make it easier for follow-ups to happen and promotes collaboration as it is easier to share information among your call center agents and across the organization. If the debtor contacts the organization, anyone who answers can handle the call.
Remote work: Our virtual contact center is equipped with a softphone that will help your team to contact debtors from almost anywhere, so they can make collection calls from their desktop computer or mobile device. Calling apps make it easier for you to create a virtual call center with debt collectors in different locations, who can call debtors as if they were in the same office.
Call broadcast: Using this tool, organizations can upload their loan books, upload the reminder message, and schedule calls to a large audience at once. The calls can be personalized to the caller. Messages can be curated to include a CTA for instance, Press 1 to pay immediately or press 2 to pay later.
Businesses will be able to track their collection metrics from the reports provided by the campaigns, allowing them to determine the effectiveness of the channel and its messaging. The analytics available will allow the organization to tailor its collection strategies based on the collection behaviour of its audience.
A virtual phone system improves processes of credit and debt recovery services, reducing time and costs, increasing control of phone calls, and giving you better visibility into your collections process.
Talk to us at info@mteja.io to find out how you can get started.