What is the FDCPA and Why Should You Care?

Author:  Allyson Boudousquie, Director of Business Process Marketing at Aspect

Collections agencies have been around since the 1920’s, usually bringing in debt that credit issuers were not able to collect for various reasons. The environment then was much different than it is now, however. Most of these agencies had few clients, few employees, and everything was manual. Collectors used index cards to write notes on, and when mail and phone didn’t work, these collectors would become “door knockers”, actually walking to the debtors’ homes to collect on debts.

It wasn’t really until 1977, when the United States Congress cited “abundant evidence of the use of abusive, deceptive, and unfair debt collection practices by many debt collectors”, that regulations were established around debt collections. That’s when the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA) set guidelines on how, when, and where a consumer could be contacted, began to require collectors to identify themselves and the company they worked for, and limited the information that could be given to a person that was not the debtor.

Due to these new rules of collections, businesses had to change the way they viewed their collectors.  They needed to refine business processes, including introducing new technology to optimize the use of their collections agents as well as ensure they comply with the FDCPA because failure to meet regulation requirements could result in big fines. In fact, they still can – the largest fine to date is $2.25 million.

The good news is that today’s technology is better than ever, which means that compliance can be virtually automatic. A variety of capabilities like quality monitoring, list management, and performance management tools, are configured to help organizations meet FDCPA requirements. In particular, some areas that require particular focus include:

• Dialing and tracking based on your customers’ time zones. Your system must be able to differentiate time zones, and base calling on those time zones, in order to both meet FDCPA and individual state requirements.
• Scheduling callbacks to avoid harassing your debtors.
• Reducing work phone calling at the account level or through exclusion process to ensure prohibited numbers are not called.
• Monitoring and tracking to ensure collectors are not using abusive or profane language, revealing specifics of the debt to any third parties, or using language that could be considered threatening.

The goal of technology used in collections call centers is to help mitigate risk and improve collections as much as possible. How else can companies like Aspect help? We’d love to hear your suggestions.

Comments (1)

(2 votes, average: 3.50 out of 5)

 Loading ...

Can UC Really Improve Your Customer Service?

Author: Gary Barnett, CTO, Aspect

We’ve been talking with customers about unified communications (UC) for quite some time. We’re finding that many people understand how deploying UC across the enterprise can increase employee collaboration and productivity, and significantly lower costs, such as those associated with conferencing and telephone usage. We’re also finding, however, that a lot of people are still unclear about where the contact center fits in. So, I thought I’d take some time to share with you a real-world example of how Aspect has implemented UC across our own global contact center environment with multiple locations and languages.

You may already know that earlier this year, Aspect completed a company-wide deployment of Microsoft’s UC solution, Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2. We immediately began to see the benefits from this new technology. But, being in the contact center business, we really felt like we needed to take the capabilities one step further and use it to radically improve the service we were providing to our customers.  So, we implemented Seamless Customer Service, a unified communications application for the contact center, and transform the way our Aspect® Technical Services team was communicating with our customers.

Now, thanks to Seamless Customer Service and its Ask an Expert feature, our support personnel has access to UC capabilities such as presence detection, instant messaging (IM) and conference calling, which gives them instant visibility to worldwide contact center resources and those in the enterprise who are available to assist with customer inquiries. Ask the Expert enables the support engineer to quickly and easily use presence identification and skill criteria to find an available expert and rapidly address customer questions that may not be available in the knowledge base. They can call anyone in the enterprise by pointing and clicking (no need to use valuable seconds looking up phone numbers and dialing the phone), and even route a customer interaction directly to that expert if necessary. This eliminates the wait time to request assistance and effectively expands the pool of available resources for the Aspect support center.

We immediately began seeing measurable improvements in key customer experience metrics after implementing Seamless Customer Service and OCS in our contact centers. In the last year, call hold times have been reduced by 76 percent from an average of 2.5 minutes per call to just 44 seconds per call. Our overall first day resolution rate has increased by seven percent and the time to reach a support technician with the correct skill set has improved by eight percent.

Thanks to Seamless Customer Service, we’ve improved our call routing through our worldwide resource pool to the most appropriate available resource based on factors such as product, language, region and issue severity. Clearly, the right UC capabilities can mean measurable improvements in customer satisfaction for any global contact center environment.

Are you ready to fit your contact center into your UC strategy?

Comments (0)

(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...