Eight Steps to Collection and Recovery Excellence for First and Third Parties

Transcription

1 white paper Eight Steps to Collection and Recovery Excellence for First and Third Parties December 2013 Summary This paper identifies eight key areas with the greatest impact on your collection and recovery success. If you re in the collection and recovery industry (C&R) and have a mature infrastructure in place, understanding the limitations associated with traditional debt collection and practices is key to your success. Applying new technologies to best-practice processing can transform your performance. It s that simple. This paper examines eight practices that help organizations not only turn C&R into a more successful and compliant activity, but also gain a significant competitive advantage. 1. Reduce operational negation 2. Plan and execute precision-based strategies 3. Apply effort where it secures the greatest reward 4. Optimize channels 5. Make headcount count 6. Take a fresh look at repayment solutions 7. Improve agent negotiation skills 8. Align management information with operational goals Make every decision count TM

2 Economic, regulatory and consumer shifts force first- and third-party collectors to quickly identify and move past barriers to optimize collection and recovery performance. Insights in analytics, data, strategy and operations help identify where existing practices are holding organizations back, and take C&R processing to the next level. No matter how unique your business challenges or atypical your operations, you ll discover how vastly dissimilar organizations can demonstrate very similar behaviors, and how each can benefit from the insights provided here. 1. Reduce the Incidence of Operational Negation in Your Organization Without systems that enforce consistency and connected decisions, businesses often make one set of decisions that negate the value created by another department and another set of decisions. This is called operational negation. For example: the marketing department attracts high risk customers, or customer management recommends collection strategies for accounts that are ignored by the collections business unit. Rooting out negation is critical to implementing any of the best practices discussed herein. Offered below are common examples of negation in action: People: There s a lack of ownership and accountability, and a focus on productivity rather than loss reduction or increased payments. Skill sets may be broad but few specialists exist, making it difficult to identify and enhance underperforming areas. Technology: There s too much reliance on power dialers an average 9% right-party contact rate to (dialer) download is common. What s happening to the 91% of accounts not contacted? Process: There s a big pool approach that combines all buckets of delinquency with no or limited operational segmentation. Data-driven, risk-segmented strategies are lost when they hit the collections operation. Performance Management: There s a focus on collecting cash but not necessarily improving delinquency and increasing collection. Key questions aren t being asked, such as: Where is the cash coming from early or late stage? What collection strategies are working? How are they trending? How many accounts are impacted? Is cash increasing at the same rate as delinquency; and what is the cost to collect? Are there ample repayment solutions to drive better performance for the organization as a whole, and retain good customers? Knowledge Management: The effectiveness of the most experienced collectors is diminished by buddying with new hires. External Factors: There s a potential shortfall in collector resource if external factors aren t considered and fed into a capacity-planning process Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. page 2

3 To help identify and move beyond negation, you need a clear perspective of how your organizational strategies and C&R processes and tools can be improved and realigned. Sometimes this knowledge comes from within; frequently, however, collection agencies and first parties are reaching to external sources for clear, unbiased perspectives to gain an upper hand on negation. In either case, it s important to ensure you have full stakeholder buy-in, specific actions and targeted results, and willingness and flexibility to change even when it hurts. Without a clear view of where negation exists, adopting any best practice will be a challenge. 2. Plan and Execute a Precision-Based Strategy While operational business units frequently measure tried and true productivity and resulting key performance indicators (KPIs), they rarely calculate the variance to strategy adherence. This is a clear example of negation at work. If the variance is constant, operations may not realize the results aren t in line with expections from the strategy design. The following diagram illustrates a planned analytics-derived strategy. Differing risk segments, often further enhanced by balance at risk, are expected to receive different treatment with respect to the tone and timing of system-determined collection events. ANALYTICS HELP PRESCRIBE THE RIGHT CUSTOMER TREATMENTS Risk/ Intensity Low risk Medium risk High risk Soft tone Medium tone 200% Firm tone 350% 75% Action type and timing Action type and timing Action type and timing You can expect between 5% and 30% uplift in collection effectiveness resulting from data-driven strategy and decision rules Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. page 3

4 However, with negation at work, it s not unusual for resource and technology constraints to influence customer treatments and execution starts to resemble the strategy below. CONSTRAINTS FREQUENTLY NEGATE OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE Risk/ Intensity Low risk Medium risk High risk Medium tone 150% Medium tone Medium tone 150% 150% Operations should track relational and specific measures that answer strategy adherence questions, such as: Does every message type differ by risk group? Do sequential messages align with the strategy-planned progressive tone? What are trended contacts per account at a given strategy point? Is the effort applied in line with strategic goals? Consider differentiated penetration, contact effectiveness and negotiation result. Does the operation send tactical text messages, for example, outside of strategy? Is the timing of execution optimal, e.g., percentage of operational time deployed at best time to contact? 2013 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. page 4

5 3. Apply Effort Where It Secures the Greatest Reward Too often, operational execution is planned around operating hours and staff attendance instead of aligning each resource with strategy demands driven by optimal effectiveness. In this situation, where capacity drives strategy, a business will often underperform as the strategy design is adversely impacted based on suboptimal execution practices. For example: high risk accounts without the correct intensity level required due to insufficient resources. For many organizations, resource levels aren t coordinated to meet the penetration target during periods of optimal efficiency. There s also a need to understand the relationship between effort and result. Activity-focused metrics that don t align with tangible results cause operational blind spots. In changing the best time to call and effort by risk group, one client realized 300 additional promises per day, saving 1.5 million in provisions. Full transparency is delivered through the gathering and understanding of the metrics necessary to understand the relationship between five sequential steps: activity, action, response, result and impact. Without full transparency, organizations aren t able to relate penetration to contact effectiveness. It s possible to have 100% penetration and not talk to a customer. Depending on how penetration is defined, 100% penetration may be reported though not all accounts have been worked. targets are often deployed only in relation to predictive dialer activity. Consideration should be given to whether each and every activity type should have varying levels of penetration. You also need to know where it s appropriate to have concurrent activity of different but aligned actions to drive higher penetration and related results. 4. Optimize Channels to Transform C&R Results For one credit issuer, payments made within two days increased from 24% to 74% with implementation of selfserve/online payments. Collection contact channels have come a long way in a short time and integration of these channels is seen as the new norm. Increasingly, medium to large collection operations, along with more traditional letter contact methods, have deployed or are deploying: Dialer: Predictive, Preview and Manual. IVR: Inbound and outbound auto-messaging with self-serve. SMS, with leading organizations deploying mobile payment and self-serve. Web: , internet portal self-serve, collections online chat. If these channels aren t managed interactively, it becomes common to see: Customer complaints and possible regulatory repercussions. Mixed messages to customers. Overwork of low risk and underwork of high risk customers as different risk types fall under a pooled execution approach. Single channel contact to save pennies when thousands of dollars are held in provision. Common myths that should be re-examined include: Our customer will not self-serve. Our customers will not respond through X channel. We have to speak to every customer. We save a lot of money by cutting down on use of Y channel Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. page 5

6 Symptoms of channel non-performance Contact attempted at less-than-best contact times. Inbound calls not managed by risk type. Compromise on outbound penetration for inbound abandon rate. Blend across all inbound and outbound resources as opposed to ring fenced to target/service level agreement (SLA) requirement. Same timing, message content and script. Overuse of voic messages. Minimal self-serve functionality. Non-differential SLAs, for staff and channel, by risk and age of delinquency. Channel management, targeting and integration can create C&R competitive and regulatory advantages. Securing effective communication is the primary success criteria and the action on which all other actions and treatments are determined. This is especially true when considering most markets have restrictions on how often a contact attempt can be made. Most organizations have their own guidelines regarding the number of contact channels deployed per day in order to avoid complaints. When layered with multiple customer products, this becomes an even more complex problem. Market leaders are now deploying contact channel optimization, which considers the best time and channel to make contact. Reporting and controls are built in to identify regulatory or policy contact breaches. Real-time processing automatically kills other channel activity if contact is made elsewhere; e.g., a dialer or SMS event will be killed if an inbound call is received prior to the scheduled outreach. This helps drive the effectiveness of channels, ensuring no channel is inappropriately sacrificed for the achievement or performance of another, without very clear understanding of the profit/loss impact of this decision. 5. Make Your Headcount Count By optimizing resource use, one organization achieved a 100% increase in delinquency volume managed without increasing resources. In the world of operational negation, capacity planning is dictated by budgetary factors rather than what is required to deliver the strategy. In mid-sized to smaller operations (e.g., fewer than 100 collection resources), it s rare to see the coexistence of sophisticated capacity and resource allocation planning. Although collection operations of this size limit options for how capacity planning is conducted, you can still account for seasonal to intraday granularity, specific industry and other factors. Whatever the size of your C&R function, the capacity plan should reflect which risk segment will require a human action at a given point in time. The resource allocation plan should be of sufficient detail to identify the skill sets required throughout a given day to undertake work related to a specific SLA and level of effort. For first parties, the basis of any capacity plan is to achieve or improve the loss forecast. However, in many cases, the plan is based predominantly on historical dialer volumes and effort. For third parties, the goal is to increase collection and recovery. Risk-to-skill routing requires a high technology competency and sophisticated resource allocation, but can more than recompense the investment over time Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. page 6

7 6. Take a Fresh Look at Repayment Solutions One collection agency reported a 12% reduction in charge-off due to revising its repayment solution policy. The range of repayment solutions is often inadequate to cater to the breadth of customer situations and affordability. Financial institutions have a multitude of credit products to meet customer requirements; once the customer enters collections, a solution for every need is frequently absent. Solutions should be appropriate to cover the large number of situations that roll into the categories of: Disorganized. Short-term cash flow constraint. Medium-term liquidity constraint. Permanent financial change. Repayment solutions should be available to cater to: Short-term immediate payment. Arrangement to pay arrears either in fixed or variable installments and time frames. Re-aging customers who can meet forward contractual obligations, but are unable to repay accumulated arrears. Restructure customers who should be retained but will need revised credit terms to complete the repayment. Understand when to deploy a commercial decision to mitigate loss and base it on more than a fixed percent settlement threshold. Most organizations don t capture and use the reason for delinquency in their solution selection rules. Many do not have a decision logic tool at the agent desk level that enables a hierarchy of solution options presented to agents based on business rules. Also, many either don t have or have too limited an ability to effectively measure the customer s disposable income. Lack of demographic trigger figures will often lead to inconsistent agent determination of which solution has the best success potential. A strong repayment tool kit, supported with flexible but well-defined selection decision logic, is the primary driver of collection effectiveness after successful contact. It s essential that each stage of delinquency has a different set of treatments so that conversations can take a different approach as the account ages, rather than investing in the contact but having nothing different with which to negotiate. Repayment solutions can be strategized as proactive offerings across different channels. Collection and recovery staff should know who to retain or exit, and have solution selection policies and tools that enable them to retain good customers while mitigating the loss, if any, to be incurred on an exit customer. Management should understand how solution selection affects portfolio quality, net present value, provision and capital adequacy, cash flow, and ultimately profitability across the short, medium and longer term. This management information should be used to refine treatment options so successful treatments can be identified and promoted while other treatments, perhaps just delaying the inevitable, are removed Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. page 7

8 7. Improve Agents Negotiation Skills By investing in an enhanced agent toolkit, one organization achieved a 66% reduction in solution default rates. Even if everything else is intact, poor agent negotiation skills can negate your edge. Culprits include a low-cost workforce or failure to train and develop staff in C&R-specific skill sets. Strategic investments in human capital during challenging economic climates have helped numerous organizations gain an edge. The combination of flexible strategic repayment options, savvy technology investments and expert collector negotiation skills helps organizations transform collection capabilities. To be effective, organizations must ensure collectors have a clear understanding of various call models in relation to customer profiles and segments. Linking agent success to reductions in delinquency, roll rates and provisions is the bottom line for leaders around the globe. Many organizations ask questions like: What are the best metrics to measure collector success? How should targets link back to forecasted losses? What type of incentive plans link to strategies? Collector incentive plans are most effective when they reward behaviors that directly correlate to delinquency targets. It s critical that targets focus on improving the P&L performance. Many organizations reward collectors on cash collected and productivity-related measures. Leading organizations align the targets and rewards to impact on provisions. This often highlights a differential impact to the P&L where cash collected measures an equal performance or, in the worst cases, reward the least effective of two collectors. Leading organizations will be measuring provisions saved per hour at the collector level, rather than relying on cash collected, which may or may not lead to a provision save. 8. Align Management Information with Operational Goals Six months after implementing advanced MIS, one financial institution reported cards were 5% ahead of plan and loans 4%. Substandard management data and knowing how to use that data limits an organization s ability to assess collector, portfolio and strategy performance. Managers find themselves spending a large amount of time trying to develop reports that provide insight into portfolio weaknesses and trends. Companies are realizing the value in linking data sources and investing in sophisticated reporting packages to precisely track, analyze and change strategies. When you align advanced management information system (MIS) capabilities with focused operational goals and strategies, you can optimally determine when to: Call vs. hold out. Use dialer vs. manual. Allocate internally vs. externally. Send letters vs. voice or . Choose the most effective repayment solution for a given circumstance. Choose the most effective recovery option sell, soak (hold), keep or place. Prevent delinquency or increase collection rates. Keep or exit a customer (know who and when). Management information improvements, including automation, allow managers to make clear and precise decisions to improve efficiency and overall effectiveness. Most organizations have a base level of actual and absolute MIS. However, few have developed sophisticated relational measures that enable them to understand the relative performance of various activities, and the results derived from a combination of these. Advanced MIS allows targeted champion/challenger campaigns that typically secure a competitive advantage in collection performance. These organizations continue to push the frontier of efficiency and effectiveness across the performance of the debt portfolio, operational execution, staff effectiveness and cost of collections Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. page 8

9 »» Transitioning from Operational Negation to Collections Excellence Many organizations have invested significantly in analytics and technology, but fail to leverage the investment or gain the competitive advantage and business benefits initially expected due to operational negation. By identifying and minimizing the impact of negation, organizations can achieve the maximum ROI possible from their C&R strategies. IDENTIFYING AND OVERCOMING BARRIERS DRIVES MEASURABLE RESULTS FOR FIRST-PARTY FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS European Bank Managed 100% increase in accounts through economic downturn ROI of 1200% 7% bad debt saving Operating costs reduced by nearly $500K per annum Promises taken increased 37% Asian Bank 9% improvement in bad debt 50% improvement in staff attrition Greater buy-in and accountability Vastly improved problemsolving environment US Bank 35% improvement in staff attrition Increased productivity resulting in a 25% improvement in contact rates Improved employee morale and engagement Reduced training and new hire cost FICO C&R business consultants can help identify best practices in your market, ensuring operational barriers are identified, worked around, eliminated and better understood. If you re experiencing low performing collections and recovery, or would simply like to learn more about enhancing your capabilities and results, please let us know. For immediate assistance, use the contact information listed at the end of this paper. Visit for more white papers, including: Five Imperatives in a Shifting Collections Landscape Unlocking New Doors to Collection Success Realize the Profit Potential Already on Your Books 2013 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. page 9

10 about FICO FICO (NYSE: FICO) is a leading analytics software company, helping businesses in 80+ countries make better decisions that drive higher levels of growth, profitability and customer satisfaction. The company s groundbreaking use of Big Data and mathematical algorithms to predict consumer behavior has transformed entire industries. FICO provides analytics software and tools used across multiple industries to manage risk, fight fraud, build more profitable customer relationships, optimize operations and meet strict government regulations. Many of our products reach industry-wide adoption such as the FICO Score, the standard measure of consumer credit risk in the United States. FICO solutions leverage open-source standards and cloud computing to maximize flexibility, speed deployment and reduce costs. The company also helps millions of people manage their personal credit health. Learn more at FICO and Make every decision count are trademarks or registered trademarks of Fair Isaac Corporation in the United States and in other countries. Other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 2871WP 12/13 PDF For more information North America toll-free International web (0) info@fico.com