A Practical Guide to The Effective Use of Automated Dialing in Collections

Innovative Solutions
A Practical Guide
to
The Effective Use of
Automated Dialing in Collections
"The phone is still the most effective method for contacting people. When the issue is collecting outstanding debts, postal mail in combination with inbound and outbound calls can be effective for early-stage debtors, but as debt ages, the phone is the primary tool for getting promises from people to pay back what they owe.1Although manual dialing is still used to collect debt and is an appropriate method in some cases, an automated dialer, sometimes referred to as a "predictive dialer" or simply a "dialer," provides a huge jump in productivity in collections. Agents are productive when they're talking to people, although it's not uncommon for a debt collector to have to place 20 or more calls to get one actual debtor on the phone. This low contact rate, combined with dialing one number at a time, typically translates to low productivity - 5 to 15 minutes per hour talking to live persons and the rest spent unproductively dialing the phone, listening to the phone ring, and getting answering machines, wrong numbers, busy signals, etc. By placing calls in parallel and focusing on delivering only live speakers to collectors, an automated dialer can make debt collectors many times more productive with the collector actually talking to people 45 to 55 minutes each hour.
In that sense, the phone is the most effective method for collecting debt, and automated dialing is the most effective method for using the phone to collect debt. However, utilizing an automated predictive dialer doesn't always mean you're getting the most out of it. The difference between the normal use and effective use of an automated dialer is often the key competitive advantage for a collections operation. This practical guide focuses on strategies for effectively using automated dialing in collections.
Blending inbound and outboundThere is an ongoing debate as to whether it's more effective to dedicate collectors to outbound dialing or to use blending to deliver inbound calls as well as automated outbound calls to collectors. Blending can be a very effective method for increasing debt liquidation rates. Often, the negative perception of blending has more to do with prior experience with technology unable to effectively mix inbound and outbound calls. When inbound and outbound calls can be truly blended, and when the automated outbound system dynamically adjusts its dialing pace based on inbound load, blending makes sense.
Collections operations sometimes refer to inbound calls as "money calls" because a debtor is calling them; therefore, effectively handling inbound calls is important. And because such inbound calls are as vital as outbound calls in the overall collections process, does it make sense to dedicate a group of top debt collectors to handle inbound calls? If so, how many collectors? What should those top debt collectors do when the inbound load is low? What about when there are more calls than they can handle? Should this overflow of money calls roll to customer service agents who are handling other, less aggressive types of inbound calls? Without blending, these and other questions must be answered.
With true blending, a collections operation can make optimal use of its best collectors by dialing aggressively when the inbound load is low, and by slowing down automated dialing as the inbound load increases. Routing inbound money calls to the best collectors will improve the bottom line. What is the difference between an outbound collections call and an inbound collections call? After the initial introductions, isn't a collector having the same discussion whether they called the debtor or the debtor called them?
Optimizing calling listsIt is not uncommon for a collections operation to place millions of calls each day in an effort to collect debt. Some percentage of these calls connect to live people, and some of those live people, known as right-party contacts, are the people who will make promises to pay back that debt. The key to optimizing collections, then, is to utilize dials as effectively as possible to get promises to pay.
When a collections operation can make only so many calls each day, how does it optimize call volumes, i.e., the list of accounts and numbers dialed? One approach is to contact those people first and most often who owe the largest debt. To r... [download for more]