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.

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Practical Applications for On-Demand Solutions

Author:  Gary Barnett, CTO at Aspect

Not too long ago, a Top 5 bank decided it wanted to focus more on maximizing “share of wallet.” In order to do that, the bank needed to align its voice portal with its overall bank strategy, a process that required getting rid of multiple, inflexible legacy dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) systems. The bank ended up replacing these systems with a tightly integrated on-demand inbound self-service solution that included a financial services voice portal. The pay off was huge. The bank’s customers noticed the change immediately as they began to experience a single phone call view of their entire bank relationship, rather than just bits and pieces of disparate information. As customer satisfaction increased, the bank saw impressive results. It experienced a 10 percent increase in its voice portal containment rate, and a dramatic decrease in the average time customers were spending in the voice portal, driving $25 million in cost savings per year. The bank also was able to reduce callbacks by 25 percent, and increase the cross-sell response rate by 7.5 percent, driving $56 million in new bank revenue during the first year after implementation.

Another example is an online global travel company that saw a big business impact when it began using an on-demand voice portal for customer care. When the company entered the market in 2001, it immediately recognized that outstanding customer experiences could help set it apart from its competition. The company’s differentiating strategy was to deliver timely information to its customers within seconds of a change. In order to achieve this goal, the company began using data from its customers’ travel itineraries to provide the most relevant information, and then utilized an on-demand proactive customer care solution to communicate that information to customers via high quality recorded messages. Since the company has implemented the on-demand solution, its sales have doubled per year, while inbound call volume has remained approximately the same. What’s more, 80 percent of the company’s customers have indicated that they would refer a friend and 25 percent said they would use the company to book another trip within 12 months.

We’ve seen several of our customers use on-demand solutions for collections. It’s widely known there is significant value in proactively contacting delinquent customers within the first 15 days of their delinquencies. Some companies are using on-demand voice portal solutions in early stage collections to deliver reminder messages about outstanding bills and provide customers with the option to pay by phone or make arrangements to pay. These types of automated interactions sometimes result in more in-depth discussions with agents. However, managing initial contact on demand with automated messages or self service reduces the burden on agents and enables them to focus on the mid- and late-stage delinquencies, which are often more complex to solve.

How do you feel about using on-demand solutions?

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Debt Settlement – No Longer a Dirty Phrase

Author:  Allyson Boudousquie, Director of Business Process Marketing for the PerformanceEdge Group at Aspect

It used to be commonplace for American consumers to refinance their homes for more than they owed, then use the extra cash to pay off credit cards and other debt. But, the unstable economy has brought with it a credit crunch, as well as a significant drop in home values. As a result, many homeowners have lost the ability to borrow against their homes, and the number of past due accounts on all types of debt has risen to massive proportions.

On one side of the fence, you have lenders who are looking for new and innovative ways to recoup more of the money they have paid out. And, on the other side are consumers – a large number who are genuine in their desire to pay back what they have borrowed, but are struggling to stay afloat. When both of these parties come together to agree on a debt settlement, it’s often a win-win for everyone.  By agreeing to settle, lenders often recover more money than they would otherwise have gotten back ($700 is better than $0 on a $1,000 loan), and consumers gain the ability to make payments that actually fit into their budgets.

So, how can you use settlement offers to increase your collections results?   

Start by creating strategic lists that target the right contacts – people who you believe would be willing and able to make settlement payments.  With campaign optimization tools, you can aggregate, then slice and dice data based on criteria such as delinquency, credit bureau scores and risk scores. Using sophisticated filters, exclusion and Best Time to Call capabilities, you can identify and target the right customers so that you can proactively call them where and when you will be most likely to reach them.

After you cull your list, you may find that it makes sense to create a “settlement queue” that is solely comprised of agents and/or subject matter experts who specialize in structuring and negotiating settlement agreements. Another option is to have regular agents reach out to these customers, talk to them about their options and, when a customer expresses interest, transfer that customer to a special “gate” where final negotiations take place and terms are agreed upon. Whatever you decide, it’s important that you continue to refine your targets and your strategy as you develop a successful debt settlement history.  Doing so will help you ensure the best possible business results.

Have you structured settlement negotiations yet? If so, we’d love to hear about what you’re doing and the technology you’re using.

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Are we entering the Age of the Cell Phone?

Author:  Bob Kelly, Senior Vice President of The PerformanceEdge Group at Aspect

A lot of people in the U.S., myself included, use their cell phones pretty extensively on a daily basis. And, some have even ditched their land line – almost 15 percent of U.S. households are using cell phone service exclusively .  Plus, when you focus on younger consumers that number rises significantly, with about 33 percent of 18 to 29 year olds saying they currently use only a cell phone or the Internet to make phone calls.

The shift from landline to mobile phone is beginning to have ramifications on U.S.-based organizations that make their livelihood connecting with consumers via telephone. As a result, we’re seeing credit card and mortgage companies change their policies and accept cell phones as primary contact numbers for applications. They’re also amending their terms and conditions for existing accounts so they are able to legally contact their customers via cell phone for collections purposes.

But, are companies tailoring their communications strategies and technologies to account for cell phone usage?  If not, they should be! Why?  Because “contact-ability” is different at different times of day for every phone number listed on an account, and this varies by consumer. For instance, some people carry their cell phones with them at all times and have them on virtually 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  Obviously, the best way to reach these customers is via cell. Others carry their personal cell phones in the morning, the evening, and on weekends, but turn them off between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. It might be easiest to reach these customers on a business phone number during the work day, and on a cell phone after 5 p.m.

By using the right technology, companies can sort customer records by type of phone number, and automatically score the probability of making contact at certain times of day at specific destinations versus answering machine or no contact at all. Best Time to Call applications combined with outbound dialers, for example, can track the probability of successful contact on multiple numbers on each account, regardless of whether they are cell or landline numbers. It then identifies the optimal phone number to call, based on the time of day the campaign is being run and the phone availability within the types of contact numbers. In the end, employing this type of technology means that companies have to make fewer call attempts while achieving better results.

Let’s face it. Increased cell phone usage is already adding another variant to strategies of who companies call, when they call, and what resources they should apply. Are you prepared to deal with the rising number of mobile phone-faithful?

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Delinquencies are Rising – How is Your Collections Center Keeping Up?

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

Everywhere you look, there are stories about rising delinquencies in the United States.  A recently released report from the Mortgage Bankers Association says that eight percent of mortgages are delinquent – the highest rate of delinquency ever recorded in the survey, which began in 1972.  Not so long ago, American Express said that about four percent of their loans were at least 30 days late.  And, according to Equifax, the home equity line of credit delinquency rates just made their largest jump in 10 years.

An economy in peril means that your collections contact center is busier than it has ever been and is most likely struggling to handle the workload.  Don’t pull your hair out yet!  Before you do that, take a good look at the tools you have in place and see how your center can use them to work harder, smarter, and improve your right party contacts and enhance dollars collected.

For example, is it possible for you to take some of the burden off your agents? Maybe you can use your technology to segment your debtors according to risk level.  If you have low-risk or debtors on payment plans who just need simple payment reminders, you can use outbound self-service capabilities to proactively reach out to these customers.  With a targeted automated message, you can remind them of the impending due date and give them the immediate choice to either pay by phone or speak to an agent.  By taking this approach, you can more effectively absorb increased business volumes, while freeing up your collections agents to work on riskier accounts.

The next thing to consider is how successful your center has been when it comes to actually making contact with your more frequent debtors. It’s much easier to work out payment plans when you talk to your customers, rather than leave them messages.  If you aren’t already doing so, you can leverage your outbound dialing and best time to call capabilities to initiate phone calls to debtors at the times and places they are most likely to be reached. The odds are that it will help you to drastically increase your collections yield.

Finally, don’t underestimate the value of a well-managed work force. Make sure you’re using workforce management capabilities to optimally schedule your outbound and blended resources.  After all, it doesn’t help your budget or your bottom line if you’ve got agents sitting around twiddling their thumbs, or if your customers are calling you back, but hanging up because your hold time is too long and/or they have to be transferred to a collector that can handle their account

Segmenting debtors, improving proactive outreach and self-service capabilities, engaging best time to call practices and enhancing your use of workforce management are only some of the things you can do to immediately improve the performance of your collections center.  Has your organization developed any best practices or innovative processes to improving debt collection?

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It’s Time to Free IT!

Author: Mike Sheridan, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Strategy

I was recently at a tradeshow speaking with a number of operations managers who described some of the challenges they are facing in the contact center: slow speed of technology deployments, costly maintenance contracts, difficulty tracking the effectiveness of individual agents, and a lack of metrics, goals and actionable data. In these extremely challenging times, everyone is looking for a way to save a buck. Some organizations need to identify immediate cost-savings opportunities, while others are looking more closely at what they can do over the long term.

Plus, another challenge that we hear regularly is that companies have to continually think about the end-of-life of their contact center software, PBXs and teleconferencing solutions. One large financial company told us that 72 percent of all their technology was at or nearing end of life.

The good news is, there is a better way to address these concerns in the contact center – and unified communications is the driver. By combining specific capabilities into a unified communications application that uses software to target operational objectives (such as customer service, collections and sales), organizations can better drive company goals and objectives, start using the solutions quicker and reduce the costs associated with implementation and maintenance.

For example, by uniting capabilities like inbound and voice portal and call centers can coordinate a customer’s experience from self-service through to live agent assisted service and even bring in experts from outside the contact center to improve first call resolution and enhance the overall customer experience. Or, by bringing together outbound, voice portal and campaign management capabilities into a unified communications application, organizations can automate early stage collections and provide a more effective past-due account targeting strategy to reduce delinquencies and write-offs.

Not only does combining these capabilities from one vendor into a single unified communications applications allow organizations to target very specific business processes, it also helps them get the technology they need up and running quickly, and leverage the advantages of standards-based IT-ready software solutions. In fact, we’ve seen customers at Aspect reduce maintenance costs by 20 percent and improve productivity by 10 percent by using unified communications applications.

Since so many companies are looking to get the most ROI out of their benefits quickly, it makes sense to deploy an application tailored to specific business goals and requirements. Is your company seeing these challenges that the operations managers mentioned above?

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Beyond Dialer Capabilities to True Campaign Optimization

Author: Mike Sheridan

Today, in this uncertain economy, outbound phone calls to your customers are perhaps even more valuable than they have ever been. In an effort to shore up customer loyalty, many organizations are proactively telephoning customers to follow-up on recent experiences. Other organizations are bolstering cross selling and up selling efforts, using the telephone as their tool of choice. And, collections organizations are working overtime and calling people by the as fast as they can, trying to secure delinquent funds.

Unfortunately, not all contact centers are using the right technology for these strategically important initiatives – they are still relying on dialers purchased years ago. If you are one of those centers you may be missing out on a system that provides easier-to-use, expanded outbound capabilities in conjunction with complimentary contact center capabilities, via a Web services Microsoft .Net platform.

By switching to unified products running on a .Net platform, you could more easily build campaigns from disparate host data sources, customer interaction histories and complex business rules, which would enable you to take advantage of real-time business intelligence. You could schedule the system to do more things automatically: complete downloads and uploads, manage records in an automated fashion throughout the day, and predict the best phone number and hour of day to place calls and subsequently feed the information into your calling strategy. And, perhaps best of all, since this type of product is standards-based, there would few integration issues across dialers, databases, or other contact center systems, like the automatic call distributor or voice portal.

Think about this. If you spend less time developing, deploying and analyzing your outbound campaigns, you could spend more time coaching your agents, improving your services, and coming up with new and innovative ways to help your company meet its overall objectives. Your department would run more smoothly, but you’d also realize an increase in contact success rates resulting from more accurate campaign lists, which would presumably lead to better results – more customer loyalty, more sales and higher collection rates. These results would be great for your business, but it would also make you look like a hero.

So, the big question now is, what’s holding you back? When are you going to make the leap from legacy dialer to more comprehensive outbound capabilities?

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IP Success Story, Now a “Centre of Excellence”

Author: Serge Hyppolite

First, I’d like to thank Gary, Jim and Roger for letting me post my first blog! As director of product management, I’ve spoken with a lot of companies that are evaluating the possibility of moving to an IP-infrastructure in their contact centers. Many of these organizations ask about the return on investment and are looking for examples of companies that have successfully transitioned to IP. One such example that comes to mind is Garlands Call Centres.

Garlands has been an Aspect customer for years, providing a range of outsourced services for various business processes. This UK-based company made a commitment to creating a 21st century IT infrastructure to gain a competitive differentiator through technology leadership. A key piece of this strategy was building a technologically advanced contact center, using leading-edge IP and Aspect Software standards-compliant solutions interoperating with other third-party vendor products.

The results have been tremendous. Garlands was able to reduce its technology footprint and administrative costs, cut IT operating costs by 25 percent, improved overall architecture uptime to 99.9 percent, and gained a competitive advantage with its IP contact center—which played a significant role in four business wins worth more than £12 million.

Not only did Garlands successfully transition to IP, but the company also recently announced the development of a Centre of Excellence for Collections and Debt Recovery. I think this new collections center will be a very promising business offering from Garlands, given the current market volatility and increasing debt collection requirements. The company picked a good time to transition to IP – now Garlands has a competitive advantage and the flexibility to quickly and easily respond to the changing market demands of the collections industry, allowing them to scale up or down as needed.

And most importantly, Garlands is being recognized for their ability to capitalize on advanced technology. In fact, Garlands’ new IP contact centre won the North East region ‘Orange Best Use of Technology in Business’ award at the 2007 National Business Awards in the UK.

Is your company encountering success or challenges in your transition to IP? I’d like to hear how IP is playing a role in your company’s business strategies.

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Celebrate Your Agents’ Independence

We all like the idea of autonomy and the notion of our time being “our own”. Nowhere is this more critical and more true than in the part of your business where each person’s demeanor can impact your company’s brand in the eyes of your customers – in your contact center.

On Friday, we will observe Independence Day in the U.S. Whether you’re in the U.S. or abroad, you my want to take a few minutes this week to think about how you can enrich your contact center agents’ independence and, in turn, enhance the experiences they deliver to your customers. These four things will get you off and running to celebrating your agents’ independence and empowering them in the ways that best suit your company.

1. Schedule the self-serve way: Empower your agents to independently manage their schedules online or via phone using a self-service system.
2. Encourage a little healthy competition to get in the independent spirit: Let agents themselves bid on shifts they want, vacation times, overtime work and schedule changes within controlled parameters.
3. Let agents see if their performance is worth an award: Enable agents to check on their progress toward set productivity goals and bonus attainment. They may just make it to Disney World this year, after all.
4. Take it easy: Don’t do anything manually that can be done in a more efficient manner. Streamline and automate schedule changes and notifications to reduce administrative costs and increase productivity.

One of the best ways to boost morale and reduce turnover is to empower your agents to control their own schedules, and to check their performance progress and other information pertinent to their work. Regardless of where you are located, in honor of Independence Day in the U.S., celebrate your agents’ independence by implementing the right technology supported by a strategy and culture that fosters autonomy and individual growth. You might be surprised at what a hero you become.

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(3 votes, average: 2.33 out of 5)

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Changing your Contact Center Reality

Author:  Gary Barnett

This week marks an exciting time for Aspect Software and the contact center industry at large.  During the past 30 or so years, we’ve developed and delivered a number of innovative, best-in-class solutions that have enhanced our customers’ business processes.  Yesterday, we announced our latest – PerformanceEdge™, the industry’s first contact optimization suite that synchronizes workforce management, recording and quality management, performance management, campaign management, and coaching and eLearning.

The rationale for bringing all of these capabilities together is based on some interesting trends we’ve been seeing in the contact center.  Transaction volumes are increasing, forecasting and planning capabilities are typically lacking, reporting is non-existent or is limited due to a lack of real-time insight — particularly where there are siloed contact center systems — technologies don’t support business process initiatives and the existence of multiple contact centers creates increased pressure on managers to deliver meaningful, high-quality customer interactions.

All of these factors have made it particularly difficult for managers to obtain a complete end-to-end view of contact center performance and to make adjustments on the fly as conditions change.  This has also hindered a contact center’s ability to retain their best agents.

We recognized that by packaging all critical performance optimization capabilities together as one, complete suite, we could enable organizations to leverage their complete breadth of information about company-customer interactions to help improve agent retention, enhance service levels and better meet strategic goals.  Having access to all of the historic and real-time data, metrics and recordings across all systems and sites, as well as having a single sign on to administer agents once across all applications, allows contact centers to manage staff more efficiently and decrease administration costs. 

As a result, it is easier for contact centers to be proactive because they know what’s happened in the past, they can see what’s currently going on, plan for future scenarios and take the appropriate action right away to make intraday adjustments. 

The fact is that you can really effect tremendous change in your organization’s performance by synchronizing all of your performance optimization applications. Contact centers will have the tools, knowledge and power to ensure they are meeting both consumer demands and helping the enterprise achieve its objectives.  Using the right data for the right reasons can help contact centers consider everything that is happening and act now to improve performance, meet the soaring expectations of senior executives, and at the same time, make greater contributions to the bottom line.

Have you begun implementing multiple performance optimization solutions in your contact center?  I’d love to hear about some of the results you’re seeing.

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