Introduction
Debt collection is the frontline of every lending business as it directly supports the revenues of the company. With the recent proliferation in the lending business and the affinity of today’s consumers, it is crucial that debt collection leaders adopt a smart approach when it comes to recovering what they are owed. However, as things stand, the majority of these businesses have not adopted a smart approach to debt collection, making bad debts a serious concern amongst lenders.
According to a recent report by the International Development Association (IDA), consumer debt has doubled in the last decade, and more so since the world economy took a hit due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the pandemic is making it even more difficult to recover debts for the entire globe.
The Challenge
What are the current hurdles preventing collections teams from solving debts efficiently and effectively?
Inadequate reporting - this is often fuelled by inaccurate data which consequently harms strategic collections planning. A lot of money is wasted following inefficient, complex, and manual processes.
Having multiple existing collection tools renders debt collection teams unable to create, analyze, and optimize holistic, omnichannel collections strategies. This makes it challenging to provide a truly customer-centric experience.
Data Fragmentation - Collection management is hampered when collectors have to jump between several decentralized tools, manually retrieving and updating customer data as they go.
The solution
Automating your collection process makes it easier for collections teams to access crucial metrics, boost their strategies on an ongoing basis, reach large volumes of past-due customers, improve their customer experience, and transform their retention rates. It is therefore a no-brainer to have tools that automate your collection process. Automated calls are an effective, affordable, yet overlooked service that debt collection businesses can benefit greatly from. How can your business adopt Automated Calls for your collection process? Let’s dive in.
What Are Automated Calls?
Imagine this; you have over 1,000 debtors to reach out to before the end of the week and remind them about paying their debt. You have 10 agents ready to call these debtors. Which do you think would be the faster and more effective way of connecting with each debtor:
A manual calling system that requires your agents to dial each phone number and wait for the debtor to answer? Or
An automated system that allows you to schedule automated payment reminder calls to thousands of your debtors at the same time?
Naturally, the latter eliminates a lot of waiting time and is therefore a much faster way for your agents to cover more ground.
An Automated Call system is a software that allows you to interact with your customer database without human intervention. It allows you to record a message, set up the call, and send it to numerous people simultaneously.
Benefits of Automated Debt Collection Calls
A report by Forbes states that even though tighter debt collection margins and increasing difficulty in reaching debtors have affected the industry, properly automating your collection process can significantly improve profitability and productivity. Below are the benefits of automating your debt collection calls:
Call scheduling: you are able to set the time period during which you want to initiate the call to your debtors. This helps you instigate calls during hours that debtors are more likely to pick up, and automatically retry the call when they don’t.
Employee productivity: automating debt collection calls helps eliminate manual administrative tasks, hence freeing up time and increasing productivity for collectors.
Improved customer service: automated calls are short, straight to the point, and provide debtors with all the necessary information without being overbearing.
Reduced operational costs: Using automated calls as a tool for debt collection helps organizations save money that would have otherwise been used for resources such as hiring more agents or collectors, equipment, office space, etc.
Reports and analysis: most automated call systems provide reports and analyze data to offer deep insights into collection trends and patterns.
Introducing Mteja’s Automated Calls Solution
Mteja is a cloud telephony solutions provider established in 2019 and currently serves over 200 businesses in over 13 markets with 150 telecom integrations. We offer a ready-made web platform (mteja.io) that enables businesses to structure and automate their customer engagements over the following mobile channels; IVR/Call-center, USSD, SMS, and Airtime.
We labor to understand how businesses interact with their customers and innovate around this to make it easy for businesses to deliver the right message to their customers at all times.
Mteja offers a simple platform for users to design and deploy simple or complex call flows, with zero technical knowledge required. We eliminate the complexities associated with setting up and deploying call flows, offering the ideal Automated Call solution for any business looking to launch any automated call service quickly without investing in any technical resources.
What are the benefits of using Mteja’s Automated Calls Solution?
Ready-made Platform: Mteja’s plug-and-play solution allows businesses to launch automated customer engagement processes quickly without investing in any technical resources. This significantly helps in cutting down on development and tech support costs and time.
Mteja Flows: This is a powerful feature that allows non-techies to visually design and deploy omnichannel menus in minutes. It allows you to customize multi-level interaction flows and menus on IVR, USSD, and SMS by dragging and dropping, thus eliminating the need to hire a developer. This feature would enable you to set up your automated call flow in minutes hence improving your turnaround time.
As customer trends and needs change, our plug-and-play solution makes it possible for you to make changes to your existing call flows in real-time without creating them from scratch.
Omnichannel platform: Many businesses have embraced the omnichannel philosophy, and recognize that in order to run effective debt collection strategies their agents need to stay in touch with debtors over multiple channels. Mteja offers an omnichannel platform that enables you to unify customer engagements from all their communication channels (IVR, USSD, SMS). We, therefore, help you save money and effort because you don’t have to look for another communication tool.
Integration capabilities: Our APIs enable you to integrate seamlessly with your external business applications. For example, you can integrate with your payment gateway and automatically update the transaction details of a debtor who paid their due after receiving a reminder. You can also integrate with your CRM, to help streamline tasks and unify your lending process.
Reporting and Analytics: Mteja’s reporting and analytics feature aggregates, organizes, and summarizes call data, providing invaluable insights into trends. You can get a clear view of the customer journey, the number of debtors who picked up the call, the success rate of your call campaign, etc. From this, you can evaluate the insights and come up with new strategies to help improve your debt collection strategies.
Moving forward
The key to achieving debt collection success lies in working smarter, not harder. You don’t have to stick to the same old manual debt collection strategies anymore. Wave goodbye to making manual calls and bouncing between multiple tools. Instead, streamline your collection strategy using Mteja’s platform, a one-stop shop for all your debt collection needs.
With Mteja, your collection process will become more effective - meaning you will increase your recovery rate and decrease your cost to collect.
Ready to get started? If so, book a demo today.