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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Regulation Sometimes Leads to Improved Processes

Author:  Lynne Levy, Senior Business Process Product Manager at Aspect

A few weeks ago, the final piece of the 2008 amendments to the federal telemarketing rule took effect. As a result, telemarketers no longer are able to make calls that deliver pre-recorded messages (robocalls) without a previously obtained signed, written agreement from the recipient. In instances where the consumer has provided written consent, the pre-recorded message must provide the consumer with the ability to opt-out either through a toll free number or through Interactive Voice Response (IVR) or key pad entry. This is no joking matter as the fines can be quite steep – up to $16,000 per call. It is important to note that this regulation applies to business-to-consumer calling vs. business-to-business interactions.

Believe it or not, I actually think this change is good for the telemarketing industry. This new amendment will compel companies to really get to know their customers and give them the chance to show their customers that they are good organizations with which they’ll want to do business. It will also force companies to run more targeted calling campaigns to the consumers who are most likely to be interested in their offers. By reaching out to key segments of customers with live agents, there is more of an opportunity for companies to explore their customers’ pain points, increase their sales through solutions-based selling, and strengthen customer relationships. When used correctly, this type of personalized approach results in positive brand building – again, the kind that makes people actually want to interact with a company.

I also think that companies using the right tools in their contact centers – tools with telemarketing compliance capabilities – will see that their compliance process will be largely automated. Centers should be using capabilities like high accuracy answering machine detection (AMD) to identify when a consumer, answering machine or voicemail service has answered the call. And by taking advantage of extensive list management capabilities that allow for highly segmented lists that can be updated automatically. Or high transfer speeds to quickly move answered calls from the predictive dialer to a live sales person. According to the new amendment, 97 percent of telesales calls that are answered by a live person must be connected to a live sales person within two seconds. In addition, there needs to be a way for a call, when being handled through a voice portal, to enable the consumer to add his/her number to the Do-Not-Call Registry.

Other technologies are designed to help companies increase the effectiveness of their campaigns while ensuring regulatory compliance. For instance, advanced pacing algorithms allow companies to track call result history over time and predict the best phone number and hour of day to place calls. With some solutions, such as Advanced List Management within Aspect Unified IP, that information is automatically used to create optimized calling strategies that are based on campaign objectives and prioritized by user-defined criteria. Then, those optimized accounts are fed to the predictive dialer for execution, and record levels are dynamically adjusted as agents log in. The automatic adjustment ensures that enough agents are available to handle successful outbound contacts as they are made so that abandonment rates remain acceptable.

Success in this new paradigm will not be based on technology alone. Agent training will also be key. Companies will need to provide agents with in-depth sales and product knowledge so they can up-sell and cross-sell products that customers actually want. Relying on canned scripts could result in constantly trying to sell consumers something they don’t need, which negatively impacts brand perception and a customers’ desire to conduct business with a company.

This new amendment will definitely impact the way contact centers conduct business. Has it affected you? If so, how?

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Preparation is the Key to Successful Change

Author:  Lynne Levy, Senior Business Process Product Manager, Aspect

If your contact center conducts business in the United States, take note.  A notable amendment to the FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule is set to go into effect in the not-so-distant future. And, if you haven’t already begun taking action to ensure your centers are in compliance, now’s the time to get started.

Effective September 1, 2009, you will no longer be able to place calls that deliver prerecorded messages to customers with whom you have an existing business relationship (EBR). After that date, you’ll be able to initiate these calls only to customers who’ve already provided you with express written consent to receive such calls.

But don’t frown. This can actually be good news. If you take the time now to build a database of customers who want to opt in, your outbound efforts can actually become more fruitful. Instead of wasting time and money reaching out to customers who will immediately hang up, you’ll be focusing more of your efforts on customers who are interested in what your company has to offer. This should yield better results for your telemarketing campaigns, and your customers will be happier because they’ll be getting exactly what they want.

The trick is to start building your database now, if you haven’t already begun to do so.  You can use your voice portal to proactively call customers and ask if they wish to continue receiving information about your company. Your database script can give customers the option to “press 1 to continue to receive information” or “press 2 to no longer receive information.”  Taking that a step further, don’t be shy to ask how customers prefer to be contacted – home phone, email, cell phone, text message, etc.  Once you have all this information, you’ll be able to mail the appropriate written communications for your customers to sign.  Then, after September 1, you’ll be ready to use your Advanced List Management capabilities to create targeted calling lists that are in compliance with the law, and outbound dialer functionality to initiate your more targeted campaigns.   

How are you preparing for the upcoming FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule amendment?

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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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(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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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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(3 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)

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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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(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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There’s Something To Be Said for Proactive Customer Service

Author:  Jim Mitchell

When Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Bank recently postponed their concert dates in Ft. Lauderdale and Orlando, FL, Ticketmaster proactively reached out to concertgoers to let them know. 

There was, of course, the public notification. Someone shared the information with the media who then communicated it to the public-at-large.  But, what if a ticket holder was busy with their everyday life and just didn’t happen to catch the news for a day or two?  Could they have driven all the way to the concert only to be disappointed and have to turn around and head home?  That’s not particularly appealing, especially if the concertgoer traveled a long way to get there.

My friend Cathy could have been in that situation. She works a demanding, full-time job and has a small child.  Cathy had been looking forward to the concert for months and had arranged for a baby-sitter weeks in advance.  Cathy was disappointed when her insomniac friend, who heard the news of the postponement in the wee hours of the morning preceding the concert, called her the day of the event to say she’d learned that the concert was temporarily off.

But Cathy’s friend wasn’t her only source of information. Cathy also heard directly from Ticketmaster, where she had purchased her tickets online.  The ticketing company sent her a brief, but important email.  In the correspondence, they notified Cathy of the postponement, said that the tickets would be honored for the new concert date, provided the reason for the delay, and gave a link to an online form so that she could submit comments or questions. 

The great news is that Ticketmaster is clearly embracing proactive customer care and with today’s modern contact center technology, they had a lot of choices in how they could have provided that service.  Not only could they take the proactive email approach, they could have also used a proactive outbound calling campaign using a dialer and an IVR to deliver targeted, automated messages containing this important information.  And there are a number of variables available there as well:  they could use the dialer and IVR with the option to speak to an agent or they could just use the outbound dialer to automatically connect the agent with the customer when they answer the phone.  They even could have leveraged speech recognition in addition to touch tone.  And of course all of these options are very easy and straightforward when using a unified platform. 

Other customer service organizations should take note of Ticketmaster’s proactive approach.  It made Cathy a much more satisfied customer.  If you were a ticketholder to this event, wouldn’t you have appreciated Ticketmaster’s proactive customer service?

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Focus on the People

Author:  Jim Mitchell

I just reviewed the results for the 2007 Aspect Contact Center Satisfaction Index.  This year’s data is especially interesting to me because it provides an in-depth look at what consumers say makes their exceptional experiences exceptional. 

The Empathy and Advocacy (people-related) scores really caught my eye – year-over-year across the board, consumers only rated contact centers marginally higher.  The more compelling story is that consumers who have had exceptional experiences score contact centers significantly higher on each Empathy and Advocacy attribute than other consumers. Why?  According to the research, these consumers say that the company with which they have had the exceptional interaction understands their needs, cares about them and their issues, delivers valuable product knowledge, and has good follow through. 

So, how can your company earn a spot on the “exceptional experiences” list?  Try some of these tricks:

Proactively reach out to your customers – make the most of your predictive dialer.  Start using it to welcome new customers to your company, verify the status of orders, confirm payments, or inquire about the quality of a service call.  Not too long ago, I purchased a gift card from an online retailer.  I immediately received an email confirmation of the order.  But, I also received a follow-up phone call from a customer service representative thanking me for my business.  Impressive!

Step up agent coaching and training efforts – take full advantage of your quality monitoring tools.  Use them to record, review, and report on customer interactions so that you can provide real-time coaching or identify areas for ongoing training.  Over time these efforts will help your center improve your level of service and enhance customer satisfaction.

I have a few more tricks up my sleeve, but I thought it might be fun to keep you in suspense.  More next time…

In the meantime, drop me a line if you’ve got some of your own ideas about improving Empathy and Advocacy scores.

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One Huge Mega System – Is that Really the Answer?

Author:  Gary Barnett

I’m sure you’re familiar with a contact center’s core interaction technologies – the automatic call distributor (ACD), the self-service application, the predictive dialer, as well as email and chat capabilities.  These technologies are the primary vehicles through which many customer-company interactions take place before reaching an agent.

These core interaction technologies are themselves supported by a number of additional technologies, such as workforce management, quality management, performance management and analytics, which are designed to help the business improve its processes and find the balance it needs for efficiency and effectiveness.

I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m providing this tutorial on the infrastructure of the contact center.  Here’s why.  One of the biggest challenges facing a contact center is figuring out how to keep all of the information maintained and shared between these various components in continual lockstep while the contact center continues to operate in a 24×7x365 dynamic environment.  For example, when a new representative is hired, the agent identification typically needs to be populated in each contact center application – a very onerous task.  And today, because so many companies have multiple contact centers in distributed/remote locations, the task of managing these systems has become incredibly complex, enormously time consuming and fraught with error.

One solution to address this problem is to create one huge mega contact center system that is used to essentially manage everything.  This approach obviously creates its own set of issues.  This system would probably not be able to scale to meet future agent levels.  And, it would generate considerable challenges if it failed while trying to support the company’s customer-facing business processes – a failure that would obviously put the business at risk.  In addition, if the existing software solutions come from different vendors, it is likely that many of these existing, fully-depreciated, and still fully-operational software licenses would need to repurchased in a mega scenario.  That is a big capital expenditure. Ouch!

What businesses really need is a centralized application layer that brings the administration of all contact centers and their components into a single location, addressing the need to eliminate complexity and reduce overhead, but at the same time keeping the individual contact center applications in place. This approach enables individual contact centers to continue to operate in the event of an outage, and eliminates the need for a business to repurchase the same software licenses again.

But you tell me…  Does mega system spell mega trouble?

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Verizon’s Got it Right – Part 2

Author:  Jim Mitchell

A few days ago, I wrote about a positive experience my friend Susan recently had with Verizon customer service.  She just called and told me about another good interaction – one that again exemplifies proactive customer service done well.  I’m always talking about using predictive dialers for proactive customer service, so I thought I should share this real life example with you.

Susan subscribes to a Verizon phone plan that allows her to make unlimited calls within the United States and Canada for one flat monthly fee. Last month, she made a few phone calls to Canada, which was a deviation from her normal in-country calling pattern.  Verizon contacted Susan to confirm that she had in fact made the phone calls, and then used the opportunity to try to upsell expanded international services.  This was quite a clever approach as Susan admitted to me that she actually appreciated the call.  She felt like Verizon was protecting her security and trying to anticipate and accommodate her needs.

Does your company deploy this type of proactive customer service strategy?  If so, I’d love to hear about it.

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