At Hito we understand the importance of making contact with your customers quickly and efficiently. The success of telephone and field contact is increased significantly by our use of intelligence to schedule the best times to call and visit. This approach drives your right party contact (RPC) rate resulting in increased payments and a shorter collection cycle.
This approach reduces the number of unsuccessful call and visit attempts, supporting your compliance with OFCOM regulations ,and delivers significant cost savings in terms of mitigating against unproductive action. Our award-winning collection platform, Edge, continually tracks, monitors and plans the best time to contact your customers using key customer intelligence and prior contact history (where available).
If there is no prior contact history, Edge will use the key customer characteristics to determine an initial call/visit window. For example, if a customer is employed and has a vehicle, Edge could schedule a ‘prime-time’ window outside of working hours (between 6am to 8am or 6pm to 9pm). Criteria are easily configurable and can be tailored to your policies, requirements and contracts.
Research by the Harvard Business Review [1], looking at three years of data, found a 49% difference in contact rates between Tuesday and Thursday and a 164% difference between calling at 1-2pm and 4-5pm. Clearly metrics vary by industry, but what is evident is that an intelligent approach will adjust your contact times around what you know about the individual.
It’s not always so obvious either, we have noticed an increase in the volume of employed customers now working from home which results in preferred contact times being logged during traditional office hours where previously they would have been planned outside of these times.
Edge records the outcome of every call or visit attempt and automatically uses this information to plan future contact times, ensuring that intelligence is continually built upon and applied. Where contact is made at home at 2pm on a Friday, future attempts will be scheduled around the same time, increasing the chance of RPC on the first attempt.
For telephone calls, optimum call times for the customer can be sent directly to your dialler via integration or displayed to an out-bound team to ensure maximum RPC rates.
Edge’s “call-back” option within the customer portal allows customers to provide the date, time and the number they wish to be contacted on. Edge will take this request and automatically schedule an agent call task at the required time without further intervention.
In addition, if an urgent visit is required, Edge will identify agents within a radius of the visit address and automatically allocate the job in near real time to the closest available agent via their handheld device and the next visit to complete.
Edge is a system that allows you to manage the complexity of optimising the best time to make contact, so your teams can concentrate on doing their jobs – confident that they’re always making contact at the very best possible time.
In the ever-evolving collections sector, these small but tremendously powerful features allow our clients to handle more cases and increase collections without the need to increase headcount or dilute customer service levels.
Contact us today to talk to us about how Edge can improve your collections operations.