Credit Management September 2019

OPINION
CHANNEL HOPPING
What are the advantages and risks of adopting a
digital approach to consumer communications?
AUTHOR – David Sheridan FCICM
IN the past decade we have seen
a significant shift in consumer
behaviour when it comes to
engaging with organisations. This
has been underpinned by the
companies’ need to increase the
level of convenience to help consumers
interact with them and in particular around
the consumer’s ability to do everything
via their smartphone. There was some
very interesting data on consumer trends
within the annual OFCOM communication
report (September 2018) reinforcing the
increasing reliance on smartphones and
being digitally connected;
• 78 percent of consumers now have a
smartphone
• Nine in ten people in the UK have access
to the web at home
• 2018 saw a seven percent decline over
2017 in call volumes per person but in
the same period a massive 40 percent
increase in data usage per person
How consumers behave and interact with
organisations is just as important to a
debt collection agency (DCA) as any other
consumer-orientated service business.
Most service businesses have a huge
amount of social media and digital focus
and are busily embracing the rising trend
of the digitally connected consumer – they
know if they don’t, they will become less
efficient and potentially lose market share.
This same risk is inherent to DCA’s. DCA’s
cannot afford not to have a digital strategy
for consumer engagement.
IN THE POST
Returning to the OFCOM report for 2018,
it analysed how consumers reacted to
address mail from organisations classifying
bills and statements as one cohort within
the data analysed. The OFCOM analysis
showed that in response to this type of
mail, customer reacted as follows;
• 35 percent of consumers immediately
went online
• 34 percent call someone
Consumer behaviour towards DCA’s is
changing and will continue to change in
line with convenient interaction methods
that are increasingly being used by
consumers. Some DCA’s are leading the
way in embracing digital communication
channels with their customers and are
reaping huge benefits from doing so.
Within our own business, we have
witnessed a significant shift in consumer
behaviour in how consumers are engaging
with us as result of our focused efforts to
develop our digital channels. At the heart
of our strategy is our website – it’s the ‘goto’
point for our customers. As the above
OFCOM mailing analysis shows, customers
mostly respond to arrears mailing by
visiting your website. Therefore, having
a website that is informative, intuitive
to navigate and provides full account
management capabilities has been a large
investment for our business.
As a result of this investment, we have
seen, and continue to see, a huge uptake in
consumer engagement across all aspects of
our website and this has been supported by
our focus on developing web ‘pull’ strategies
to encourage customers to interact with us
this way.
These digital interaction strategies
encouraging customers to visit our
website/ interact with us, has meant a
deeper focus on our part on email contact
strategies, as well as investing in Rich Text
Solutions that enable us to deliver verified
communications such as letters, payment
reminders and forgot to pay links to
customer on their mobile device. We have
also enabled webchat and that platform is
already generating close to ten percent of
the telephony contact levels.
As a result of the success of these contact
strategies outbound dialling and physical
letters are becoming the secondary ‘if no
response to digital’ option for customer
engagement. Our digital strategies provide
very detailed insight to how our customers
respond and interact with us – we get
no such data through these secondary
methods.
DIGITAL BENEFITS
So based on our own experience, how
The Recognised Standard / www.cicm.com / September 2019 / PAGE 34