I recently came upon some interesting statistics showing exactly how mobile we’ve become as a society. First, we’re now seeing that the majority of customers prefer shopping online rather than in stores. While that fact may not be earth shattering (except for brick and mortar retailers), a few others I recently saw did catch me by surprise. For example, there are almost 3 billion people worldwide using the internet. And did you know that, starting in 2013, there are now more smartphone and/or tablets shipping than PCs? And the most compelling, to me, is that there are currently more mobile subscribers than there are people on the planet!
While it’s clear that customers like to browse and discover in self-service environments, are we clear on exactly what that means to us in Collections operations? Well, for starters this isn’t something that is going to go away. We know this, but what we might not be anticipating is how quickly our other, more traditional, forms of customer interactions are going to diminish, or even disappear. It also means that simply providing a means for our customers to conduct bare-minimum-banking is not going to cut it any more. Customers expect (not just want) the same experiences and capabilities online, even on their phones, as they expect to be able to do in person or on the phone with our agents. Finally, have we thought about how our current online self-service offerings and experience impact our customers’ loyalty? Studies reported by Informatica in the UK have shown that satisfied customers are 83% more likely to be loyal, and that customer ascribe a high amount of their customer satisfaction to how their service providers handle them in online and social media transactions. We need to be able to interact with, and satisfy, our customers in their online interactions with us.
What’s also apparent is that our legacy processes in place for collecting customer data will no longer be able to tell the full story. We need to broaden how we learn about and react to our customers’ buying patterns and transacting patterns, especially for those in collections: being able to effectively use this “metadata” directly affects our cost of collection. Without this information, we are not equipped to truly understand our customers, discern what motivates them and causes them to behave in a certain way so we can hopefully guide them toward the outcomes we want. Being able to gain this greater understanding of our customers, using both their data and this metadata to drive our strategies dynamically, is where we derive our competitive advantage.
This is, of course, the fundamental value proposition that only a fully unified approach like Katabat (formerly CMC) can deliver. Being able to capture the data and metadata within your automated business process workflows and to make real-time decisions as new information comes in, as you can do with Katabat (formerly CredAgility)-based solutions, gives you both the flexibility and power to drive superior effectiveness and results. See your Katabat (formerly CMC) representative or contact us at sales@katabat.com to discover how to unleash the effectiveness and efficiency gains that our clients are enjoying, all while improving their ability to conduct provably compliant operations. We’d love to talk to you about it.
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Katabat is the leading provider of debt collections software to banks, agencies, and alternative lenders. Founded in 2006 and led by a diverse team of lending executives and leading software engineers, Katabat pioneered digital collections and has led the industry ever since. It is our mission to provide the best credit collections software in the market and solve debt resolution from the perspectives of both lenders and borrowers.
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