Introduction. Contact rate Promise rate Kept rate and payment size Regulatory compliance Sustained ability to collect - 2 -

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2 Introduction The sub-prime mortgage crisis and the crash of the housing market have created declining economic conditions for consumers. Although debt is on the rise, debt collection is now more challenging than ever as consumers are left with significantly less money available for payment. Key industry performance indicators, such as money collected per hour, reflect a significant decline in collection performance. In addition, regulatory oversight of collection practices is posing other challenges to debt collection organizations. Prohibited conduct such as threatening and harassing customers, disclosing debt to third parties and using abusive language is putting firms at risk of fines that can amount to millions of dollars. Recently, a debt collection agency and its owner agreed to pay the U.S. Federal Trade Commission $2.25 million in fines for allegedly misleading, threatening and harassing consumers 1. Consumer complaints to the FTC are rapidly rising, and totaled more than 78,000 complaints about third party debt collectors in Collection agents who violate regulations might create a significant liability to a firm, which may not fully realize the extent of it until the damage is already done. Interaction analytics is an emerging contact center technology that can help collection organizations increase collection effectiveness and reduce risk by improving regulatory compliance. This paper will show how NICE Interaction Analytics can optimize collection performance in the following areas: Contact rate Promise rate Kept rate and payment size Regulatory compliance Sustained ability to collect 1 Nationwide Debt Collector Will Pay $2.25 Million to Settle FTC Charges, Federal Trade Commission Release, November 21,

3 Increasing Collection Effectiveness The Collection Yield Pyramid Amount Collected Payment Size Kept Rate Promise Rate Contact Rate Penetration Rate Figure 1: The collection yield pyramid The collection yield pyramid is an industry best practice model to evaluate collection effectiveness and performance. Each stage of the pyramid represents an opportunity to improve collection effectiveness and increase the amount of collected money. Penetration rate: the percentage of contact attempts where a connection is established with the other party. Contact rate: the percentage of contacts where the identity of the account holder is established. Promise rate: the percentage of contacts where collector obtains a verbal commitment from the customer to pay an amount at a defined time. Kept rate: the percentage of customer promises that are eventually kept. Payment size: the average size of the payment out of the full amount due. Amount collected: total amount collected per effort (e.g. money collected per hour) - 3 -

4 Collection Optimization with Interaction Analytics Collection performance can improve significantly by implementing productive contact scenarios, improving agent negotiation skills and encouraging the use of immediate payment methods. Random call monitoring and generic agent training have limited ability to identify agent knowledge gaps or to uncover best practices. By analyzing all interactions and automatically evaluating the various collection efforts, interaction analytics delivers collection insights and helps improve collection performance. Increasing Contact Rate Contacting the account holder is the first step of a successful collection. On many occasions, the account holder might not be available on the first try. Interaction analytics can identify non-productive contact scenarios such as: Not following best practice agent introduction techniques Missed opportunities to inquire about alternative contact methods or best times to contact Agents avoiding contact when dealing with difficult customers or those with bad promise/kept history Call categorization and scoring rules enable classifying interactions according to contact effectiveness and generalizing best practices Increasing Promise Rate Agent negotiation skills can have a significant impact on the customer promise rate. Interaction analytics can be used to measure the promise rate across all contacts and identify agents with high promise rates vs. agents with low promise rates. It can also identify agents with ineffective negotiation techniques by focusing on long calls that do not yield promises to pay. The automatic categorization of calls creates a repository of good calls and bad calls to be used for coaching purposes. Supervisors can then deliver targeted training to agents that need assistance, focusing on specific negotiation scenarios. Increasing Kept Rate and Payment Size Encouraging the use of immediate payment methods is an effective way to increase the kept rate and payment size. Interaction Analytics identifies agents with higher kept rate and allows supervisors to extract best practices for coaching purposes. Interaction Analytics also allows you to perform post-mortem analysis: Analyze reasons for broken promises Review an agent s judgment and reasoning when deciding that a realistic promise was given by a customer Review an agent s judgment regarding the settlement amount This analysis can be used to provide feedback to agents in order to enforce policies, and improve agents performance

5 Improving Regulatory Compliance The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) regulates the collection industry and protects consumers from the use of abusive, deceptive, and unfair debt collection practices. The act defines various types of prohibited conduct such as communication with third parties, abusive language, threats and other types of abusive and deceptive conduct. Compliance violation puts the company at risk of incurring significant fines as demonstrated above in the introduction. One of the challenges organizations face when trying to eliminate violations is that violations might go unnoticed for a long time. By the time the collection organization is approached by the FTC to respond to customer complaints, thousands of complaints may have already been accumulated. Since consumers do not need to prove actual damages in order to claim statutory damages of up to $1,000 per violation, this might amount to millions of dollars in potential liability to the collector. Interaction analytics reduces this risk by automatically monitoring all the collection calls. Using a pre-defined word lexicon that includes phrases such as I will sue you, legal actions, this is illegal, the system identifies abusive language and customers that might feel threatened by the agent. Once the system identifies potential compliance risks an alert is automatically sent to a risk manager who can drill down and listen to a recording of the interactions. After listening to the interaction the information can be verified and appropriate action can be taken to reduce risks. Protecting the Ability to Collect The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act defines required conduct that debt collectors must follow including a requirement that agents identify themselves as debt collectors and notify the customer that any information obtained will be used for the propose of collecting debt. Failure to follow these directives may make it difficult for firms to collect the relevant debt. Interaction analytics automatically monitors all calls to ensure that agents adhere to mandated scripts and disclose the required information. By analyzing the words said by the agent at the beginning of the call, interaction analytics identifies interactions where proper disclosure was potentially missing. An automatic is then sent to a risk manager alerting him or her of the potential risk. Supervisors can then follow with targeted training and communication to avoid future cases of non-disclosure

6 Conclusion The NICE Collection Optimization Business Solution is a package based on interaction analytics. The solution offers companies the means to obtain multidimensional business insights to improve operational efficiency, increase customer loyalty and retention and improve marketing and sales effectiveness. By leveraging the pre-defined word and phrase lexicon, collection organizations can quickly identify best practices as well as agent knowledge gaps, and they can use this information to deliver targeted training to improve agent performance and increase money collected per hour. Script adherence monitoring capabilities automatically identify suspected compliance violations and proactive notifications alert risk managers so they can take immediate action to reduce risk and limit the firm s liability

7 ABOUT NICE NICE Systems (NASDAQ: NICE) is the leading provider of Insight from Interactions solutions and value-added services, powered by advanced analytics of unstructured multimedia content from telephony, web, radio and video communications. NICE s solutions address the needs of the enterprise and security markets, enabling organizations to operate in an insightful and proactive manner, and take immediate action to improve business and operational performance and ensure safety and security. NICE has over 24,000 customers in more than 150 countries, including approximately 80 of the Fortune 100 companies. More information is available at CONTACTS Global International HQ, Israel, T , F Americas, North America, T , F EMEA, Europe & Middle East, T , F APAC, Asia Pacific, T , F DATE 04/2009 CONTENTS OF THIS DOCUMENT ARE COPYRIGHT