(Newswire.net — April, 1, 2013) New London, NH — Automating busy, no answer, voice mail, wrong number, misdials, etc. frees collector time to voice-to-voice debtor conversations.
AVM can effectively and efficiently deliver a message (the “reminder” nudge), or it can connect bankers to debtors; facilitating that collection conversation. There is great effectiveness on early-stage and lower-balance delinquencies. Shifting that call volume away from collectors frees them to focus on later-stage and higher-balance accounts, resulting in a more positive financial impact to their financial institution. Although, it can also be very useful in sustaining contact with charged-off accounts, again protecting collectors from call time to debts with a lower probability of recovery.
Automated Voice Messaging is a reliable economic solution to many regulatory and servicing requirements with both positive compliance and collection results. AVM ensures the required calls happen on time and are accurately documented.
“Since implementing IBS’ Voice Messaging System, through SoundBite, we’re averaging 2,000 dial attempts daily, with a 75% penetration rate and a 25% rate of message left with a live person. I’d need 18 more FTEs to achieve those results in our prior manual dialing mode,” says Mickey Watts, SVP Indirect Lending at Anderson Brothers Bank (Mullins, SC).
The Powerful Impact of AVM
What debts can best be served using Automated Voice Messaging and what impact should your organization expect? Generally, AVM is effective in supporting collections on all debts except commercial accounts. Institutions should see a dramatic increase in call volume and collector productivity. As more debtors pay faster, as total outstanding delinquencies drop; collected revenue will increase.
Institutions can achieve call volumes that are essentially impossible to do manually. Call volumes can ramp up and down as delinquency volumes change—unlike staff increases and reductions. AVM call costs are a very small fraction of those same calls done manually.
As cited in a case study by one global messaging provider, “The City of Edmonton was only able to place 3,000 calls on a monthly basis, reaching only about 400 contacts. Using the SoundBite solution to initiate nearly 12,000 calls on a monthly basis, the City now reaches over 2,800 contacts—a 700% increase over manual calling efforts.”
Connie Hagen, Mortgage Collections Manager with North Shore Bank (Brookfield, WI) says, “Within minutes of CARM-Pro/SoundBite initiating calls, we immediately started receiving callbacks from the customers stating they got a message to call us. We started using CARM-Pro/SoundBite in April 2009 and thought after a few months it might lose its effectiveness, but that has not happened! In the past, when our surge in delinquencies would come in, it would take 2 people 3 to 4 days to call every account and that was at a frantic calling schedule. With CARM-Pro/SoundBite when that surge now hits, all of the accounts, no matter how many, (50 or 1000) are called within a matter of minutes and we immediately start to see the results of people returning the calls.”
AVM Invaluable in Collection Compliance
Collection compliance has grown to a far more serious problem, in a large part due to the regulatory, investor, guarantor and insurer response of tighter collection requirements due to the recession. Automated Voice Messaging is a reliable economic solution to those tighter regulatory and servicing requirements.
Is there a down side to AVM? If you can boost collection compliance, hold or reduce FTE, and improve collection results, what is the down side? Be careful to govern the outbound message volume to match your inbound call capacity. You can overwhelm the collections team with a surge in debtor incoming calls so be sure to leverage a solution that dynamically balances outbound calls to match your inbound call capacity.