“Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face”
A fair observation from Mike Tyson, with the former part of this quote, in particular, having held true, countless times down the years for me, in both customer services and debt management roles.
The absolute certainty I’ve felt staring at change of supply energy accounts on a placement file, only to find miscategorised change of tenancies later.
The utter alignment and buy in we’ve got, that if we drop correspondence to customers on a certain day, the resultant contact will happen on day X, only for it to happen on day Y and at Z times the level of staffing I’ve scheduled!
The comfort of having personal guarantors named against business debts, only to find out neither they nor the business can meet those obligations.
The list could go on, and I’m sure you could extend it even further with your own tales.
What was consistent in every event above for me, was that the plan existed. Based on some pre-emptive data points or some highly credible modelling derived from our experience of past events – the options were clear, and we knew what we were going to do with the customers moving forward.
And of course – the plan was executed beautifully on large parts of the portfolio. As it will have been for you. Sometimes it was as simple as a different brand engaging, catching a customer at the right time for them to act, or maybe just finding the right person in the business with approval to pay. Other times, the clever solution you spent many hours designing, became the hero of the hour.
But then, so too came the punch in the face. Returned mail or a phone call from someone telling you that “Alan doesn’t live here, and can you (insert as you see fit to conclude this sentence)”, the e-mail from the liquidator requesting you to join the line of other creditors, or receiving the meter reading that proves a rollover has occurred, and customer owes £28, instead of the £45k you’d just given to your best collector to resolve!
Whilst the above punches in the face may be comical in their relay, it is not lost on me, that alongside the potential for debt to continue to rise, there is the very real cost of time, effort and resources from deploying the wrong plan, with some incorrect deployments likely leading to necessity to then incur further costs and effort to get people back into the right place.
So having worked across a broad range of the collection lifecycle, I’ve recently joined Marston’s, where for me the very evident opportunity of field couldn’t be any clearer.
Whether you view field as a mechanism to re-connect and stimulate new engagement with customers, to identify and understand customer vulnerability, through to energy meter management, motor vehicle recovery or just doorstep collection opportunities – deploying any one of these could only be the tip of the iceberg.
Often, the information and intelligence that could be obtained from the observations of an experienced Field Agent could super charge your management of the customer thereafter. Especially if you source it early enough.
Simply put, if you knew more about your customers and their individual circumstances, you’d almost certainly adapt your treatment of them. You may still have a plan, but perhaps you’ll avoid the proverbial punch in the face later.
The real opportunity though, is that the place of field can be fluid. It’s not like getting a CCJ, where the treatment path and process is clearly defined and stated, and in some cases, such as in the water industry, where recent changes in regulatory conduct have created new requirements to evidence steps and process adherence before progression to legal.
A field visit can be easily crafted into almost any stage of a customer treatment journey – it can be tailored by you to obtain specific information points, with that information’s ultimate, optimum usage, potentially being to power future strategy decisions, or more crucially strategy avoidance decisions.
As technology, innovation and AI become more powerful tools, the message is apparent – the need for contact and personal engagement has never been more necessary where the technology can’t get to. We believe field can only augment the technology further if the right data points are captured.
Visible signs of dependents at a property, speaking to someone who is burying their head and in a bad place presently, a for sale sign in the front garden, or maybe the existence of assets. It will forever stay with me that one of the most eye-opening customer conversations brought to me for a decision, was a customer who was pleading for us to secure a charging order against their home because they wanted to acknowledge the debt, but they also wanted the problem to go away to give them space and time to recover.
Finally, the place of field in a compliance or regulatory setting should not be missed. From document serving through to gaining a better level of understanding around your customer, there are so many differing ways a field-based service could be utilised whilst demonstrating appropriate conduct adherence.
When I look back now on how we considered elements such as customer understanding, when seeking to evidence we’d met our Consumer Duty obligations, being able to say we’d reviewed every document in our engagement strategy suite was great, holding a degree of confidence those letters had been simplified as much as possible was helpful, but perhaps more effective and assuring would have been to have just asked customers directly as one of the stages of my field visit strategy – “do you understand the communication you’ve been receiving from us and the potential consequences”
I also understand that people could be nervous about field or have a viewpoint that it’s intrusive. That’s why we are proud that all our interactions are recorded, whether audio or video, and subjected to 100% quality assurance review. If we are acting as an extension of your brand, we know the importance of protecting it, and above all, on the days we fall short – and let’s be really honest here, everyone falls short from time to time, then we want to be able to take the learnings from those reviews and turn them into an even better service for you and your customers in the future.
So, if you select Engage, you can be assured, we are working to support you in pursuit of maximising your recovery options and potential, and with the comfort and peace of mind that our engagement at the door is ethical, professional and responsible.
If you’d like to learn more, I’d love to have that chat with you!
Mark Platts – Solutions Director
