The past decade has marked a period of significant upheaval within the collections industry. The economic disruptions of the COVID era and the implementation of Regulation F had a significant impact, as did student debt forgiveness and recent changes to the regulations around medical debt collection.
A generational shift among consumers has, arguably, had an even deeper and broader impact. Younger consumers who have spent most of their lives online now make up a substantial portion of the contemporary economy and of contemporary debt. These “digital natives” have different behaviors, attitudes, and expectations relative to older debtors. Successful debt collection techniques and strategies must evolve as well, to address those behaviors and expectations. In this article, we’ll address 10 such techniques and strategies.
1. Enhancing Your Information-Gathering Capabilities
Debtor information gathering is a fundamental first step that fuels most of the other techniques and strategies in this list. First-party creditors possess a base of information on each debtor (customer), the pertinent portions of which can be shared with third-party collections professionals as needed. This data may or may not remain accurate and up-to-date. More crucially, even when it will suffice for traditional collections efforts revolving around letters and phone calls, it is likely to be inadequate for the type of updated strategies we’ll lay out here.
The ability to access more and better data is a competitive advantage. The regulated finance-industry sources that underpin most legacy data providers’ offerings update relatively slowly. Spokeo for Business, as a more modern tool, combines those regulated data sources with a spectrum of open-source and social media intelligence.
This combination provides collections professionals with the following:
- More current information, with frequent data updates spanning multiple information sources.
- Additional phone numbers, emails, and current and former physical addresses that can assist in skip tracing.
- Debtors’ usernames and accounts on 120+ social platforms.
These accounts, and previously unrecorded phone numbers or emails, provide a wealth of additional communications channels that may be exploited for collections purposes.
2. Using Debtors’ Preferred Communications Channels
As far back as 2019, consulting giants McKinsey & Company proclaimed a “mandate” for collections professionals to focus on a digital-first communications strategy. Its research showed that consumers responded to emails and other digital communications more reliably than to phone calls and letters—and that they tended to view digital communications more favorably.
This is by no means an argument for funneling all communications through whichever medium demonstrates the most satisfactory response rate. The crucial factor is not the specific medium itself, but the debtor’s preference for a specific medium.
It’s difficult to know this in advance, though first-party creditors may request customers or app users to state a preferred communications channel. Identifying as many potential channels as possible, and trying them in turn until debtors respond and express a preference, is otherwise the most practical option.
3. Identifying Debtors Likeliest to Pay
Debtors are not a monolithic group. Some end up in collections, despite having adequate resources, because of poor organizational or budgeting skills or transient upheaval in their lives. Others find themselves in the unfortunate position of legitimately having no viable path to repayment.
Differentiating between debtors by their likelihood to repay their debt is crucial to achieving and maintaining solid returns on your collections efforts.
4. Incentivizing Early or Consistent Payment
This powerful, well-proven technique is used frequently in receivables, with fees and charges providing a negative incentive that encourages prompt payment. When payment is already delinquent, positive incentives may spur debtors to prioritize the debt you wish to collect over other obligations.
The most obvious incentive is a discount on the debt. At its simplest, this might consist of an offer to waive late fees if a payment is made or a payment arrangement negotiated by a specific date. For larger debts, a discount on the total amount may be a practical option. For many debtors, especially among lower-income groups, offering the option to skip a payment after a predetermined number of on-time payments could prove a powerful ploy.
5. Offering Flexible, Personalized Payment Plans
That last point borders upon another powerful strategy, one of offering flexible, personalized payment plans as opposed to “one size fits all” demands. Many consumers, for example, are freelancers, entrepreneurs, or rely on multiple income streams in order to pay their bills. Managing an erratic or unpredictable income is much different from planning around a biweekly paycheck or a salary that lands reliably on the 1st and 15th of each month.
Something as simple as arranging payments with a date range, as opposed to a specific date, can be a game-changer for those debtors. Building a degree of flexibility and personalization into payment arrangements is both a recognition of the more varied incomes of modern-day consumers and a means of meeting their expectations. First-party creditors have an advantage here, with their in-house data on existing customers, but both first- and third-party creditors can turn to Spokeo for Business to develop a more holistic view of each debtor.
Drawing on the principles of “gamification” in your app or site can increase the impact of both incentives and flexible payment plans. Options include providing scoreboard-style progress indicators toward an incentive or retiring the debt, rewarding each on-time payment with a celebratory graphic, or even sending cheery “You can do it!” messages as each payment date approaches.
6. Expanding Your Payment Options
This is another important example of flexibility — and one which requires relatively little explanation. Consumers expect convenience and choice in companies they deal with, for good or ill. Every additional payment option you bring to the table, including app-based payment services such as PayPal or Zelle, or digital wallets backed by Apple and Google, makes it easier for another tranche of debtors to meet their obligations.
Each payment type accepted represents a cost, whether levied by the payment processor you use or in the form of IT expenses incurred in updating your own software stack, but reducing friction in the payment process is as important for collections professionals as it is for bankers or marketers.
7. Prioritize Self-Service
Another consumer expectation that colors their experience of the collections process is the availability, or lack, of self-service options. Expecting debtors to visit a physical branch or office, or call between specific hours to speak with a human, runs counter to the online-first focus of the modern economy.
Instead, empower debtors — who are, in a very real way, your “customers” even in third-party collections — to conduct their business with you through self-service options. This bypasses scheduling difficulties for consumers and eliminates the need to speak with a human. Given the longtime (and sadly, often justified) stereotype of collections agents as adversarial, this eliminates a potential pain point for consumers.
Self-service provides a net benefit for collections professionals as well, reducing workloads for staff and enabling 24/7 debtor access. For situations that your software stack can’t manage without human intervention, your self-service offerings should include the ability for debtors to specify a suitable contact method and time to reach out.
8. Lean into Technology to Streamline your Process
Even with student debt forgiveness and the recent changes to the rules around medical debt collection, the collections industry is a high-volume business. Maintaining adequate staffing levels is an ongoing challenge, as is maintaining a cost-effective operation.
A fuller embrace of technology can alter that picture radically. Improved data-gathering and analytics products, such as Spokeo for Business, and the increasing sophistication of AI-driven software tools, hold tremendous potential for automating the collections process and reducing workloads for staff.
Improved AI chatbots, for example, could screen inquiries, answer common questions, and approve payment arrangements that fall within pre-arranged parameters. AI tools can also generate personalized payment letters, emails, texts, or social media messages.
9. Embrace Empathy
It’s an unhappy truth that the collections industry is perceived as aggressive and adversarial because collectively it frequently has been. This is counterproductive for first-party creditors, who have a vested interest in retaining their customers, and for third-party professionals who will market themselves more effectively in the long term if they avoid causing reputational damage to the first-party creditors who contract with them.
Consumers expect and demand to be treated with a measure of respect by the companies they interact with, and that includes collections professionals. Empathetic language, backed by a genuine understanding of the debtor’s situation, can help create a less adversarial atmosphere around the collections process. Forward-thinking collections agencies that prioritize empathetic communications report improved recovery rates, as well as reduced stress levels among staff.
Shifting from an adversarial model to an empathy-driven, customer-centric model requires a conscious investment in training and cultural change, but the potential benefits are significant.
10. Keeping Debtors Engaged
Making initial contact with debtors is a starting point; keeping them engaged until their debt is paid in full can be a greater challenge. First-party creditors have an innate advantage in that the debtor voluntarily chose to engage with them as a customer or subscriber. They may already use the creditor’s app or website on a regular basis, or follow the creditor on social media. Even during a debt recovery, consumers’ initial position of loyalty can potentially help keep them engaged.
The situation is different in third-party collections. There is nothing to prevent a collections firm from creating its own app and using it to interact with debtors, but persuading them to install such an app is a tough sell. Positioning your website or social media presence as a source of useful information, rather than simply a collections tool, can help. Social media in particular is a powerful tool, given the various platforms’ analytics and advertising expertise, and affords collections professionals numerous ways to drive engagement.
Utilizing Spokeo for Business to assess which platforms your debtors actually use can, in turn, determine where you’ll derive the greatest advantage from your investment in generating that useful content.
Defusing the Demographic Time Bomb with Spokeo
According to Statista, Millennials now outnumber Baby Boomers (longtime drivers of the economy), and youthful Generation Z outnumbers middle-aged Generation X. That imbalance will only grow over the coming decade, as earlier cohorts succumb to age and Generation Alpha (now children) reach college age and enter the economy themselves.
Collections professionals who cling to time-honored strategies will inevitably find themselves losing ground to those who recognize the changing attitudes and behaviors of younger consumers and accommodate them. The good news is that these youthful debtors live their lives largely online and in public, where powerful data search and analysis tools like Spokeo for Business can provide you with the information you need to engage with them successfully and cost-effectively.
To learn more about how Spokeo can empower your collections activities, to arrange a demo, or to set up a no-cost trial of the product, reach out to our team through the contact information on our Collections and Skip Tracing page.
Sources
McKinsey & Company: The Customer Mandate to Digitize Collections Strategies
US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation: 2021 FDIC National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households
BuiltIn: Gamification: What it Is and How it Works (With 8 Examples)
First National Bank of Omaha: Improve the Customer Experience With an Electronic Bill Pay Service
McKinsey & Company: The Promise of Generative AI for Credit Customer Assistance
McKinsey & Company: Holistic Customer Assistance Through Digital-First Collections
Advanced Collection Bureau, Inc: The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Effective Debt Collection
Statista: Resident Population in the United States in 2023, by Generation