Getting Maximum Results Using Minimum Resources
In the ultra-competitive 3rd party collections business, success hinges on getting maximum results with minimum resources. SoundBite helps collections firms optimize both sides of this equation better than any other collections contact solution.
Resources
Since labor makes up such a significant portion of expenses, doing more with fewer outbound agents is critical. Increasing agent productivity becomes your number one priority. Many agencies struggle with turnover rates exceeding 100%, which inhibits growth and consistent performance. Declining fee rates increase pressure to innovate in order to thrive.
To recover more debt in less time, you must increase the amount of time agents spend with right parties and reduce time spent verifying identities and leaving answering machine messages.
SoundBite automates right party verification, delivers warm inbound calls with opted-in participants, and leaves perfect answering machine messages. By virtually eliminating agent time wasted on anyone or anything other than the right party, you can get much more done using far fewer outbound agents, especially on underperforming portfolios.
Results
To improve the results of every campaign, SoundBite puts a full range of automated weapons to work for you.
In addition to penetrating deeper into lists within a given time period, SoundBite lets you create multiple calling passes according to your own dynamic rules. You can prioritize the order of calling by customer type and pick the order in which to attempt home, work, and mobile phone numbers to tune your campaign for maximum effectiveness.
Interactive SoundBite messages can encourage self-service (agent-less) payments through your IVR system. SoundBite completely eliminates the two-second delay mandated at the start of every predictive dialer call, so your message gets through immediately without being mistaken for a telemarketing call. In fact, SoundBite offers such high-quality voice messages (with seamless text-to-speech technology built in) that for debtors it’s like talking with your top agent, but without the sense of intrusion a live call often causes.
Bottom Line
There’s no more powerful, flexible, economical way to begin increasing dollars-collected-per-hour while reducing cost-per-dollar collected.
Supplement or Substitute to Reach Your Collections Goals
Maximizing revenue / recovering more debt in less time
Use SoundBite to supplement your current calling program. Adding SoundBite campaigns significantly increases penetration rates, overall contacts, and drives more opted-in right parties to your agents. You can connect with debtors before other creditors, lenders, or agencies reach them.
Maximizing profit / maintaining revenue at lower cost
Fully substitute SoundBite for your manual- and predictive dialer-driven calling. For many SoundBite clients, the substitution strategy has proven to be more compelling in terms of P&L impact. By automating repetitive tasks and penetrating lists faster, SoundBite lowers cost-per-dollar-collected and drives more profit from fewer outbound agents. Labor is the most significant cost for collections firms, so doing more with less saves money, provides consistency in your operations, and improves morale by putting agents in direct contact with more right parties during every shift.
When collections priorities change
SoundBite can uniquely respond to changing conditions by letting you adjust calling strategies as your objective switches from profit maximization to revenue maximization or somewhere in between.
Structure your approach
Soundbite impacts all the variables that affect your dollars-collected-per-hour metric. For any portfolio or group of accounts, first identify the key factors you most need to improve, such as faster penetration, more overall contacts, more payers, lower cost, or more call-backs. SoundBite's features can be applied directly to the desired metric(s) and bring dramatic results. To cite one typical case, SoundBite enabled a major collections firm to reduce full time staff while increasing collections, thereby raising revenue by 17% and decreasing expenses by 42%. Overall profit improved by more than 300%!
Our strategic partnership
SoundBite's experienced consulting team has worked with hundreds of collections scenarios to optimize results by analyzing and improving factors like best time to call, call escalation strategies, IVR optimization, call intensity ROI, test vs. control comparisons, script analysis, and more. In becoming a SoundBite client, you gain a team of experts that can help you determine your best overall calling strategy, build the most effective campaigns, and make the right tactical adjustments to help reach your crucial objectives.
Fair Practices are Best Practices
While transforming the results of your collections campaigns, Soundbite can also help your efforts to comply with the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
Time of Day
The FDCPA restricts the time of day in which valid collections calls can be made, and puts limits on repeated calling to an individual debtor. With SoundBite, you can set a time-of-day window for call attempts and SoundBite automatically projects that window across multiple time zones, so you have complete confidence in your ability to control outbound calling hours.
Frequency
The difference between a legitimate attempt to collect and impermissible harassment can hinge simply on how often a debtor is called during a period of time. SoundBite lets you set the number and frequency of attempts for each debtor, as well as when to leave – and not to leave – answering machine messages. For every new call pass, SoundBite can automatically suppress any phone numbers that were already reached in prior passes, to guard against placing unwanted repeat calls.
Verification
No matter how many calls are made in a SoundBite campaign, you can easily “contact trace” all attempts to a particular phone number in seconds. This leaves no doubt about exactly how often a number was attempted during any period of time.
Talking Points
The FDCPA describes several types of statements that are unacceptable within the context of a collections call. SoundBite automated voice messaging guarantees consistency: every message is like listening to your best-trained agent. SoundBite never gets tired, never has a “bad day,” never forgets an important point, and never says the wrong thing by accident.
Privacy
Revealing information about alleged debt to third parties is also unacceptable under the FDCPA. SoundBite’s automated right party verification feature dramatically reduces this risk by automatically soliciting personal identification information from the call recipient before proceeding with the call.