Even if a consumer fails to pay their debt, you shouldn’t stop serving them. Now, more Americans than ever have debts, as the statistics shows, which should not be a surprise whatsoever; in these challenging times, people seek to save more for a rainy day.

At this point, lenders should preserve a top-level quality of the service and continuously demonstrate it to consumers. Surprisingly, we may end up having less past-due accounts since more customers will remain loyal.

Today, we will share some tips on how to preserve this loyalty through the lending process. After all, your service doesn’t start and end with loans alone.   

Clarify In Advance

First, make sure you outline the terms of the debt agreement in due time, specifically before giving them money. Surprisingly, this obvious tip is often neglected; for example, consumers may miss stipulations written in small print about VAT included in debt calculations, and you didn’t point out this point either. When the time of billing is due, they may get frustrated with the sum, and at this point, you may not only not get the money but also lose their loyalty.

To avoid this situation, make sure you communicate debt repayment terms to consumers right from the start, and all of you are on the same page regarding sums to repay and time of repayment.

Make Consumer Service a Top Priority      

Though debt collection is about getting money back, you should not act as a debt collector. Sure, you should remind consumers about debts and settle these, yet the most productive way to get what you want is to work with them. Provide guidance, share insights, and advise them to recover the debt rather than continuously hastening them to repay the debt.

But besides giving useful info, try to get one that is useful for you. For example, by conducting surveys throughout the collection process. Are your consumers satisfied with the service? What do they think you should improve? What are their complaints? Several standard questions, yet the insights can be invaluable and sometimes even surprising.

Answer to Questions

You don’t have to answer frequent consumers’ questions repeatedly — well, in fact, you do, but you should do it wisely. Instead, provide a dedicated FAQ page on your website with all the essential info in one place. This way, you can be sure you gave them the main insight without leaving anything out of the picture. The FAQ page is always a valuable source that can be accessed easily at any time.

Communicate at the Right Touchpoints 

Phone calls are no longer trendy, and this fact relates to debt collections as well. For the latter, they are also irritating as they seem stressful and almost intimidating to many. Or, think about people with hearing disabilities; if they lend money from you, how do you expect them to talk with you by phone, anyway?

Of course, FDCPA and TCPA are always around the corner, making you think there’s no way of contacting debtors besides phone calls. Yet, there are already solutions that help you circumvent restrictions while staying compliant with the local legislation.

Therefore, SMS and email messaging again become the option to choose for you and then your consumers. In this way, you let them decide how to contact you in the most convenient way for them. Besides, you can use alternative communication means as debt reminders, but figure out the time and frequency of their sending; at this point, you should not be too frequent or pushy.

To prevent this situation, set up trigger-based notifications, yet timing and wording of push notifications are just a few factors that are crucial in receiving feedback from consumers.

What makes push notifications classify as spam?

                           Source: WMO Engage

Finally, keep in mind that various age groups in different countries prefer to make payments through different channels, and the same is true for touchpoints. Whereas millennials may use smartphones to talk to collectors and pay debts, older consumers still feel comfortable with email and a landline phone. Some prefer automated notifications without personal contact, so thorough research is necessary before jumping headlong into the generic message mess.

Perform Quality Audits

Let’s admit that often, consumers’ attitudes are affected by how we treat and serve them. That’s why there are dedicated quality management systems in place that can help you control your service quality. The software assesses each call (at any rate, you can’t reject calls altogether) against multiple quality metrics, generating an overall score with recommendations on how to improve it in further agent training.

Why scoring? Automated evaluation helps you define what works and what not in your consumer service. More, it provides you a “league table” with the best and the worst agents where you can see and evaluate the efficiency of each at a glance.          

Invest in Debt Collection Software

Dedicated software tools are the most effective way to collect debts while maintaining consumer loyalty. The right software at hand is your sure savior when you need to define debt repayment options and provide custom payment plans and their scheduling for the consumer to choose according to their current payment capacity. The system will perform all the meaningful calculations for you, freeing your time on monitoring debtors’ activity or management tasks.

By the way, there are debt collection tools that can help you with performance monitoring, too, providing all-round reporting of the main activities. Also, individual solutions can support custom reports that gather the information that you initially chose to track.

In Conclusion

To summarize, we’d like to point out that long-time consumer loyalty is the best way to get their debt repaid in due time (at least, from most of them). As you can see, operating in a highly regulated area doesn’t limit us in ways in which we can facilitate our communication with consumers, nor should we abandon new approaches to arranging it.

In the end, our goal is to provide them with the best experience possible, serving in many ways, from borrowing to education. Define the high quality standard yourself, yet strive for more — perhaps, this is the best way to keep consumers happy with your service.