Collect More Debt with Improved Technology

“The new call centre has been prompted by the massive growth in D&B’s debt recovery business.”

Many debt collection agencies have been jumping for joy since the explosive growth in debt collection services occurred mid-last year. The question on everyone’s lips, though, is, “How do we effectively and efficiently collect this debt?” For some agencies, it has meant expanding their call centres.

Dun and Bradstreet (D&B), world-leading provider of business information and business-to-business commerce needed to take this one-step further. They opened a whole new call centre to handle the explosive growth.

Christine Christian, CEO of D&B Australia and New Zealand said, “The new call centre was prompted by the massive growth in D&B’s debt recovery business.” In addition, they embarked on a joint venture with Datacom. Datacom is Australia’s leading IT outsource provider. This new 200 seat call centre on St Kilda Road in Melbourne together with the newly formed alliance, Datacom Financial Services (DFS), have been the driving forces behind effectively collecting more debt.

What about efficiency? This is often where the problem lies for debt collection agencies – to collect more debt in less time while also improving staff quality.

Often, to add to the complexity of improving call centre efficiency is the presence of multiple business units.

he D&B business units at DFS have significantly different markets, technology systems and drivers. For example, the receivables management group focus is on debt recovery using D&B’s own in-house debt management system for D&B customers. The outsourcing group uses a combination of customer provided management systems and custom developed applications to best service their client’s customers. This technology mix includes Unix based systems, Window NT based systems, Web based systems, inbound calls, outbound calls, faxing, IVR and contact management.

The Problem

The challenge for DFS was attempting to build a new call centre to service the needs of all their business units. Would several call centre systems be required? Would their internal systems have to change? Would they have to replace their existing management systems? Could a single call centre solution be found that was useable across each of the business units?

With growth outpacing their capacity, the exigencies of the situation demanded a rapid solution.

D&B’s initial need for more call centre capacity began in September 2001. D&B were using an outsourced service provider to provide the call centre infrastructure with links to D&B’s internal systems. This system worked but was far from ideal. After analysis by managers, the difficulties were clear. The facilities management costs were significant, it was difficult to make any changes in scripts or data and the integration to the internal systems was non-existent. The debt collectors were re-keying or copying and pasting data from the call centre screens into the debt management system. To add to the problem, it was also very difficult to “add” a new client to the system. It was clear that although it was functional, this system was a long way from the solution D&B needed.

In March 2002, armed with real experience and mounting frustration, D&B went in search for a solution. However, before any system could be adopted, several factors needed to be taken into consideration. The ideal solution needed to be a system that:

- integrated with their existing systems
- could easily be integrated with new and changing systems
- D&B could own and control
- would be easy to change without needing programmers
- could be implemented quickly to replace the existing oursourced centre
- actually helped the debt collector do his or her job

The Solution

D&B commissioned PowerConnex, a call centre automation company, to establish a live trial site at Notting Hill in Melbourne. PowerConnex is a Brisbane-based company that delivers a suite of award-winning tools specifically designed to increase the productivity and quality of call centre staff. The trial at D&B ran live with six customer service operators for six weeks. Mr Chris Richardson, the D&B specialist responsible for building, managing and making the D&B call centres operational, said, “I was impressed during the trial at how quickly PowerConnex was able to mould the screens to work with our systems. In particular, one afternoon I recall giving PowerConnex a campaign and script for a potential new client. The script was up the next day. We ran live with that script and reported all the results back to our potential client.”

PowerConnex is dedicated to maximising call centre performance. However, they understand that for this level of productivity to eventuate, businesses must choose solutions that allow customisabiltiy. In addition, businesses must select a “round peg for a round hole” when it comes to solving problems. D&B were no exception.

Mr Javy Llora, founder and MD of PowerConnex said, “Automating the whole customer interaction as much as possible — even when working with legacy systems — was important. Having the debt collector re-key customer data was unproductive and not acceptable so that’s the first thing we fixed at the trial site. There was no longer a need to re-key or copy and paste customer data. A couple of days after it was working, we saw several other tasks which were crying out to be automated — simple things such as always re-typing a ‘LMTRB’ (left message to ring back) status with a name and phone number. We added a few more buttons in the script that reduced the keystrokes required from about 60 characters to a single button click. Chris saw the potential for this and now they have something like six of these buttons at their finger tips.”

Mr Richardson continued, “We selected the PowerConnex system because of the flexibility and ease of changing scripts. We could use a lower level of experience and not have to pay $5,000 every time we wanted a change.”

D&B began setting up their new call centre in the last week of May 2002. This entailed obtaining desks, chairs, computers, servers, phone systems and cabling, not to mention installing and configuring the call centre software. The empty floor was transformed into a fully live call centre by the first week of July.

Mr Llora said, “Integration with the four different backends was critical. One of the beauties of PowerScript is that it can integrate seamlessly with just about any data system — demonstrated by the fast 4-week rollout. This was one of the big issues for D&B. They wanted flexibility not only now, but also in the future.”

PowerConnex is a company that prides itself in having designed and built its products in Australia for Australian call centres. D&B saw the value in this local superior service and commissioned PowerConnex to implement three modules in the new call centre. These included PowerScript — fully user customisable data capture and interaction system, PowerCall — powerful and easy to use predictive dialler and PowerWise — real-time graphical display of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and data for the whole business.

PowerScript is the debt collector’s interface. It presents the debt collector with all the information they need to perform their job. At D&B’s receivables group this includes: customer information to allow the operator to begin handling the call, the operators graphical performance statistics and context sensitive hints, tips and objection handlers to help the operator at each point in the script. Phone functions are all handled automatically via the script screen. Each of the D&B business units operates with a different script. One of D&B’s favourite aspects of PowerScript is that the business unit managers can amend and enhance their own scripts and screens without needing an IT specialist or department.

PowerCall is the world-class predictive dialler from PowerConnex. It performs all the outbound calls for the four business units. Two of these business units use call blending which is blending their outbound calls with inbound calls. PowerCall has been designed to be easy to use and work effectively with small campaigns from five people to large ones with hundreds of people. Mr Richardson was impressed with how PowerCall knew where operators were in a script so that it could make more accurate dialling predictions.

PowerWISE is the real-time graphical display for the operators, managers and D&B’s clients. PowerWISE is used to display operator performance to the operators. PowerWise wall displays are used to show clients exactly how their campaigns are going; that is, exactly how much cash has been collected at any point in time.

Mr Llora continued, “In the receivables management business, it’s the bottom line that counts and each operator talking to customers is the front-line. From what I had seen, I thought that the D&B CSO could use some feedback and motivation while waiting for calls. To make this happen, I added a simple PowerWISE graph showing how the CSO was doing, in terms of dollars and call outcomes, as well as compared to the whole group for that day. The customer service operators loved it, so we’ve now expanded the graph to show seven different KPIs that help them do their job better.”

DFS is planning to open similar centres in Sydney and New Zealand.

The bottom-line

The debt collection industry is experiencing unprecedented highs in market growth. There is more debt to collect now than there has ever been before. At the same time, though, many debt collection agencies are scrambling to get as many of these new clients under their belt as possible. Once they have secured the client, there is then a need for higher volumes of staff to meet higher targets. Ultimately, efficiency and effectiveness will sort the successful debt collection agencies from the unsuccessful. It appears obvious that any debt collection agency planning on remaining competitive in the debt collection industry, as D&B discovered, must look seriously at automating their systems. PowerConnex is adamant that if agencies improve staff productivity and quality they will most definitely maximise their call centre performance.

PowerConnex
Head Office
Level 1, 42 Devlan Street,
Mansfield, QLD, 4122
www.powerconnex.com
1300 650 119

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