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When agencies work on behalf of primary creditors or enterprises to assist with recoveries, they need to produce reporting on key metrics, performance & quality assurance, and regulatory compliance.
The aim is to:
When it’s well-executed, reporting and analysis is a win for everyone. A win for the agency because they can provide a better service, a win for clients because they can better understand their customer base and make data-backed decisions, and a win for their customers because they in turn receive better products.
That said, reporting can be a heavy lift for both the enterprise and provider. Producing written or spreadsheet reports on a weekly and monthly basis can be incredibly time-consuming, and potentially time-wasting if the insights don’t become actions.
Time really is of the essence when it comes to reporting. Slow turnaround times don’t just have implications for costs and efficiency (longer reporting times = more money spent & less being accomplished) but can also significantly stunt growth and proficiency. If you aren’t able to gain insights in real-time, a barrier is created between what’s happening on the ground and which business decisions are being made. However well-informed the decisions are, if they come too late they may be redundant.
Being a traditionally old-school industry, the debt recovery space has huge potential for improvement in terms of reporting and analytics.
To drive outcomes and provide a better service, agencies need to focus on offering three main elements:
Let’s zoom in on those...
Transparency is really important since it allows the client to access everything they need to know about their customer base, staying well within the rules of GDPR. Full transparency means that the agency avoids becoming a barrier between the client and their customers.
To provide the most valuable reporting and analysis, the data shared should go beyond just KPIs and performance metrics to include both how customers are interacting with the agency and flag up any potential vulnerability. To cover these last two points, it is essential that agencies do away with written reports and excel spreadsheets and go digital. It is only by automating the process that agencies can delve deeper into the data and analyse areas such as number of contacts made with the customer, on which channel they are interacting, the response rate, and the various payment plans that customers are considering on the user journey.
There’s no point collecting data unless you’re going to put it to good use.
Agencies should allow clients to drill down on data and make well-informed decisions from it. One of the best ways to facilitate this is by helping the client to visualise the data in a way that meets their needs via easily-digestible graphs and infographics.
At Ophelos, for example, we provide flows, graphics and images that make it quick and intuitive for our clients to build up a picture of how the operation is performing.
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The end goal of reporting and analysis is to allow businesses to provide more customer-centric products or services.
Agencies need to understand that they are a temporary go-between for businesses and individuals. The aim is to help businesses forge better, stronger relationships with their customers, ultimately providing better care for customers who do fall into debt and even preventing customers from falling into it in the first place.
Reporting is a great tool to facilitate this, but only if the business is given enough control.
Alongside offering full transparency, agencies should provide a cloud and web-based insights dashboard which businesses can securely access remotely, allowing them to view performance metrics and customer insights on any device, at any time and share them easily with their team.
Over at Ophelos, we make sure to provide our clients with complete transparency, up-to-date AI-driven insights and increased control. It’s one of the ways that we’re nurturing financially healthy and trusted relationships between businesses and customers.
A special thank you to our partners Databricks and Mode who help us build the data pipelines and infrastructure to bring the Ophelos insights to life.
