TMCnews Featured Article

Owe money on your credit card? Pay up, or soon enough a debt collector using a predictive dialer will be calling you to inform you of your monies owed, even though you more than likely are already aware.

Although this dialer can be used in countless ways, it is extremely popular within collections, as this offering can be leveraged to contact a large amount of people in a very little period of time.

In a world of continuously introduced communication options to the market that enable people to get a message across, a recent InsideArm piece analyzed how effective each contact strategy is including direct mail, email, predictive dialer calls, IVM (Interactive Voice Messaging) and AVM (Automated Voice Messaging), as well as SMS text messages.

The solutions ranked accordingly:

• Direct mail responses are in the very low single digits
• Around 20 percent of all emails are read
• Predictive dialers calls that agents complete range from the single digits to around 25 percent
• Interactive Voice Messaging (IVM) and Automated Voice Messaging (AVM) can yield contact rates from 35 to 55 percent and upwards
• SMS/Text open rates are over 98 percent

However, “with a blended channel escalation strategy, any debtor who answers an IVR call and does not respond can be immediately called back as a Predictive or Preview call with a different caller ID, perhaps a local phone number. We know the debtor is home because he/she just answered, and now you drive them right to your agents. Plus, if you have implemented a strategy where you garner consent from the debtor, you can add mobile voice or SMS to the blended campaign strategy,” according to the article. “Knowing the debtor’s preferred channel to communicate can not only allow you to communicate at the exact time you want, but may also be the difference between capturing a payment or not.”

Hence, even though a predictive dialer will yield multiple benefits such as driving efficiency and productivity and reducing costs, the best option is utilizing multiple communications channels within one solid plan of action.

The piece added, “In the challenging and dynamic collections environment, it is critical to stay flexible and consider all your options.”

A great option to closely consider is SpitFire’s Enterprise Predictive Dialer, an offering in which designated agents are transitioned into “transfer agents” who can handle transferred calls while simultaneously leveraging a customer data screen that is filled with important personal information and is sent directly from the outbound agent. This is an ideal solution for companies who require a way to take over calls from outbound agents, then transferring both the calls and data to “closers” or “verifiers.”

In addition, the transfer agent can use his or her license to make outbound calls, set up unlimited custom disposition fields and even set automatic callback alarms.

For more information about SpitFire, click here.