Author:  Jim Mitchell

During the past 25 years or so, I’ve visited thousands of customer sites and have seen countless predictive dialer implementations.  There has historically been one overriding commonality - dialers have been used to connect people to people; live agents to prospects and customers, and vice versa.  But things don’t always stay the same, and that’s good.

Just as my beloved Boston Red Sox changed the game in 2004 when they “reversed the curse” and became baseball’s World Champions, new technologies such as text-to-speech have broadened the playing field for predictive dialer applications.  Some companies are now using their dialers to call their customers, and then passing the calls to a speech self-service system rather than to an agent.

This strategy seems to be gaining momentum in the collections industry in particular.  Here’s how it works: your collections agency calls you because you are 30 days delinquent on a payment.  A speech self-service system asks, “Are you Johnny Damon?”  After you say “yes,” the system asks you for the last four digits of your social security number to verify that it is in fact talking to Johnny Damon.  You speak your digits into your phone.  The system then asks you to submit payment and offers you the option to speak with an agent.

I’ve spoken with several collections companies who have said that speech self service tied to a predictive dialer has helped them to increase their collection rates, save money on labor costs and associated overhead, and improve their customer satisfaction ratings.  One word of caution: this approach can result in a homerun for early stage collections that are under 30 or 60 days, but may not work as well for late stage delinquencies or older receivables.

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 7:15 am and is filed under Collections, Dialers, Voice Self Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.