IF OUTBOUND CALLING IS YOUR PRIMARY CONTACT OPTION, HERE'S WHY YOU ARE IN BIG TROUBLE

In the last few weeks, we have encountered some very unusual problems with our dialers getting through to consumers. There are many ongoing industry discussions about call blocking and we are now seeing some real implications of those technologies. This article will not only try to share some practical consequences of potential carrier actions. It will also make recommendations for combating what is likely to become a serious challenge for an industry that is heavily dependent on contacting its consumers. Any reference to Quantrax or its products are only included to clarify statements and not intended to be marketing material.

By Ranjan Dharmaraja, CEO, Quantrax Corporation

In 2000, collections was all about letters and phone calls. For some of you, it is unfortunately still the same. Consider these situations :

• Your dialer gets a fast busy when it calls a certain number. You realize this and place a call to the same number using a cell phone or land line. The call goes through. You call Quantrax and complain that there is a problem with the dialer!
• Your dialer is configured to send out (301) 657-2084 as the CLID (Caller ID) on a predictive campaign. The CLID sent to the consumer has the country code for China. The consumer never picks up.
• Your dialer keeps calling a number and keeps getting a connect that is never passed to an agent. Again, you think this is a dialer problem.

Rather than being related to your collection software or dialer software, we believe that these new issues are carrier-related. Situations similar to those described above will create chaos in an industry that assumes that phone calls launched by a computerized dialer will always reach the consumer. That is not what is happening today. What if the carrier is intercepting the calls before they get to the consumer?

Count the number of times your home phone rings (if you still have a land line). Usually there is no one on the line when you you say "Hello". It's a dialer trying to figure out if you are human or an answering machine, or a company trying to reduce agent wait times by launching hundreds of calls without the available agents. Everyone other than telemarketing companies and collection agencies want to stop these calls. The difference? Collection agencies have a legitimate reason for making the call. Telemarketers usually have no established relationship with the person they are trying to contact. Stop these calls and collection agencies suffer irreparable harm. And what are we trying to get at? It is already happening, and you need to do something if you have not already done so.

BACKGROUND OF CALL BLOCKING

While some of this is based on our own results and some logical conclusions, we have not exaggerated any of our analysis or findings. Let's review the background.

• This was March of 2019. Verizon's plans were described as "efforts to hang up on unwanted calls". They planned to offer free features to stop robocalls within the week! Click below to watch the clip from CBS news.

• The plan was to "Verify calls with digital fingerprint". Carriers can figure out if a call is originating from a land line, cell phone or a computer (automated dialer). They have to only choose what action they need to take if it is a "dialer" call. Think about it - The service can be monetized. The politicians and regulators take credit for solving an aggravating problem for millions of innocent consumers but of course, you can not run your business which requires you to talk to your consumers!
• AT&T, Comcast and T-Mobile had also done testing with their own options at the time Verizon made its announcement. Verizon's STIR/SHAKEN technology could verify that a call is actually coming from the number was posing as. It was designed to prevent spammers from spoofing a consumer's local area code to make it seem like a call might be legitimate. And remember, everyone was working within FCC guidelines. Did the FCC talk to you? Of course not!
• The FCC Chairman Ajit Pai "urged the nations carriers to uniformly adopt the robocall protocols by the end of the year". He even threatened "regulatory intervention" if they failed to meet that deadline. Remember when we used to pay for text messages? Do you doubt that call and message blocking options will also be free, as cell phone companies compete for business in the coming months?

With all the advanced warnings, what has the industry done? Not much other than our clients contacting us to say they are having problems with calls not going through and asking when we can "fix it". Here is the breaking news. We can not fix it.

LET'S MAKE BOLD DECISIONS AND MOVE QUICKLY

Let's learn from history. When cell phone identification became a concern several years ago, Quantrax reacted quickly, issuing a free update to identify and manage cell phones in real-time (You had to purchase the cell phone databases). We know that some vendors charged tens of thousands of dollars for their cell phone programs that did much less. What happened? Most of or clients did nothing until there was a lawsuit in Florida. The next day, everyone started to call us to check if we had a feature to check for cell phones! Of course we struggled to deploy so many systems in a few weeks. Did someone once say that collections is a great example of a "reactive industry"?

Call blocking will potentially affect your work plans in many different ways. This is a time for proactive action. You have to consider and implement options that shifts your primary contact strategy from outbound phone calls to other channels. When was the last time you got a phone call from your credit card company because there was suspicious activity on your credit card? Calling you was expensive, and these companies soon came up with the option for you to receive a text message each time your card was used. Simple and brilliant! Millions of customer service text messages go out every day, and no one is getting sued, but years later the collection industry is still wondering what they should do when a consumer gives them permission to use their cell phone to "communicate with them". The dominant conclusion seems to be that "We can do nothing" because we could be sued. This has to be the most illogical conclusion we could have come up with!

Quantrax was ready for predictable technology and consumer behavioral changes several years ago. We saw it coming when politicians started bashing the collection industry, when it was clear that people were replacing land lines with phones and when everyone decided the Uber smart phone app was the best way to hail a ride and pay for it. Many interesting new features and contact options were designed and integrated with our product a long time ago.

• E-mail - This is a viable, practical and necessary alternative to post office mail. If you think you can not use e-mail (for example as the initial demand letter), do not use it for that purpose. For every other reason, get e-mail addresses, obtain obtain permission to use them, and use them! You may have to pay for a software product or per e-mail, but that is a fraction of traditional mailing costs. We have an advanced e-mail option that allows you to get feedback from the consumer (E.g. Did they access the e-mail?). This in turn can be used to intelligently change or set up automated contact strategies.
• Cell phone drops - Companies like VOAPPS have the technology to drop a voice mail without ringing a cell phone. You should use this to urge consumers to call you, go to your website, a payment portal or a chatbot after the other options to obtain a right party contact have been exhausted.
• Text messaging - We have a simple method of identifying a cell phone with permission. If you have permission to call a cell phone, get that number onto the account detail screen. Built-in system features will force the agent to document the fact that consent was obtained. Consumers ignore many phone calls. They do not listen to every message left or open every e-mail. But they always see at least a part of every text message they receive. A report from 2015 said that Americans we sending and receiving five times as many texts compared to phone calls each day. Today, that ratio is probably much higher. After permission has been obtained, you should use text messaging for everything. Use it for post-dated checks and credit card notifications with recurring payments. Whether it is broken promise or a follow-up to urge someone to pay, send them a text message. Quantrax's system allows you to completely automate these processes, with text messages replacing traditional mail or e-mail, depending on whether consent was obtained or not. Text messaging offers you the best consumer reach at the lowest cost. Use it today. Support for text messaging is fully integrated with RMEx. The agent is able to initiate a text message from within an account (to send a link to the chatbot, as an example) and the chatbots also use text messaging (to send a payment receipt, as an example).
• Self service and chatbots - One of today's key contact requirements is knowledge of a consumer's preference for the way they wish to be contacted. The days of thinking like a collector are over. You are now in customer service and that is not the same as the recent past when we almost always had to contact our consumers. Whether it is to deposit money at a bank or pay our credit card bill, we can now do it when we choose to. That could be at 7AM on a Sunday morning or 10 PM on Friday night after a drink with the management team! Self service is the present and the future. Chatbots driven by artificial intelligence offer a perfect solution. Quantrax's chatbots evolved from traditional web site options and payment portals. The idea was simple. Create software robots that could talk with consumers about any topic an agent could handle. In addition to making a phone call, the consumer should be able to use a browser, a smart phone or a messaging application and choose a text or speech option. Quantrax announced its collection robots (for consumers and clients) at the end of 2017. These software robots understand and communicate in multiple languages and are fully integrated with our collection system, notating and updating information in the same way an agent would. The video below will give you an idea of the great potential of intelligent chatbots (watch in high resolution and with sound turned on). In this example, Alex is handling a dispute. Note how it even recites the "Safe harbor language" because of an interest balance. Will your agents do that every time?

• Skip tracing - Of course, having an accurate phone number or mailing address is vital for initially contacting a consumer to obtain consent to use modern communication channels. Skip tracing must be a key part of your contact strategy. You have only a few options - electronic batch skip tracing or manual skip tracing. Collection experts will agree that more expensive manual skip tracing yields superior results to batch options. Batch processes usually can not provide results without a social or date of birth. Manual processes can. Manual skip tracing is expensive, and experienced people can cost over $15 an hour. For many years, Quantrax has offered a manual offshore skip tracing service. It is billed by the search, not the number of hits, and will cost less than your own staff but more than a batch trace. With almost every client we have worked with, the results have more than justified the cost. The manual option will usually get more accurate information and the "No information found" result will help you to give up on accounts faster than with other some of the other skip tracing options.

Put all that together. In the coming months, as AI replaces people in numerous service industries (taxi services, travel booking, trucking (with driverless options) and customer service), the traditional "Agent" position will start to disappear. Click below to watch this simple presentation that is logical and credible, discussing the jobs of the future.

Will AI work in the collection industry? We have had companies that have processed over a thousand payments in a single month through our chatbot Alex whose design and results we talk about here.

CONCLUSIONS

This is now about a race to expand your contact options. The situation will worsen before it gets better. Trying one small change is not the answer. Remember what the taxi companies did when when they decided they had to improve customer service to compete with Uber? They installed credit card machines for customers to use. Looking back, that was not going to change a thing, and it did not. We believe that the potentially serious consequences of the threats faced by the industry calls for "big bang adoption", a method of change that involves getting rid of an existing system and transferring your processes and people to a new system simultaneously, as opposed to a slower, controlled and less risky phased adoption of change.

You will have to overcome many challenges as you adapt to the realities of tomorrow's collections.

• Resistance from key employees who have been with you for 20 years are likely to be one of your greatest challenges. If you do not want to end up like the taxi industry did, losing 80% of their market share in a short time, refuse to give in and deal with it!
• You may feel that you do not have the resources to implement the technology changes required. Get help. Quantrax has offered to help. Few have gone down that path, probably because it involves spending money. You will now be forced to spend money and it is going to cost you more.
• You will be swayed by an industry that continues to illogically hide behind the fear of lawsuits. Collection attorneys strongly warn the industry about using text messaging. The entire industry seems to have interpreted that as "Do not use text messaging even if the consumer gives you permission to do so". Let us state it simply and clearly. With bad debt, over 80% of the accounts you have will not pay regardless of what you do. The rest want to pay or could be persuaded to pay. Due to circumstances beyond your control, such as being labeled a spammer, you may not be able to contact paying consumers to remind them to go to your website or chatbot to make their payment. You got permission to use their cell phone to communicate with them when you once talked to them - Text them. Still concerned? Ask your lawyers or the ACA to give you even one example of a company that was successfully sued for sending business text messages after a consumer asked them to use the option for communications! You have insurance. With the stakes so high, why would the industry not fight such a lawsuit as a unified group?

Here are some business texting statistics from TextMagic a bulk SMS (text messaging) service company.

• 78% of US consumers say receiving a text message is the fastest way to reach them for important service updates and purchases
• 80% of US consumers said that providing basic information is the most important feature of service-based messaging to positively impact satisfaction
• 58% of consumers indicated they would view a business more positively if they offered SMS capabilities
• 91% of users who opted in to receive texts from a brand see those messages as “somewhat” or “very useful”
• 50% of consumers said they opted in to a brand’s text messages to receive personal alerts
• 31% of consumers said they opted in to a brand’s text messages so that they wouldn’t need to visit a website or app for information
• 52% of consumers said they didn’t opt in to a brand’s text messages because they found them disruptive
• 23% of consumers have received texts from companies they ordered something from

The takeaway from TextMagic was that consumers across industries are looking for more engagement through text messaging.

Even though we are suggesting that text messaging becomes a key part of your contact strategy, we expect this to be under attack from the carriers too. We expect carriers to block text messages in a similar manner to phone calls. We were recently forced to temporarily halt our text messaging services and redesign several complex processes because we believed that text message blocking was taking place and our services were being targeted for robocalling.

With the possibility of minimum wage increases and collectors becoming harder to hire, replacing agents with robots will probably become a harsh reality faster than we will accept today. Today, Quantrax believes that it has created a solution to put a robot on an outbound call with no legal implications. How do we do it? Let's suppose that you presently make a phone calls using a dialer, and on a connect, say "This call is for "Mark Namba. Please press 1 if you are Mark Namba". If you later give the consumer an option to transfer to an agent, you could just as well say, "Thank you. This call is from a debt collector etc. ......... If you would like to be transferred to our intelligent chatbot that can take a payment and handle any other other area, please press 1". You could even use this option to screen out wrong parties, saving expensive agent time and resources. Think about that. In the scenario where a chatbot gets on a traditional "phone call", you have effectively made a robot handle an outbound call. A millennial would call that cool! The cost will usually be significantly less than what an agent costs. Why? You only pay when the robot does work. Agents have to be paid even when they do nothing of value. Agent time costs an average of 35c a minute. We charge for our chatbots by the transaction, and the numbers come out to a chatbot doing the same quantity of work as an average agent for half the cost. Do not forget that these chatbots are multi-lingual and work 24/7!

As you change your thinking and as these new strategies and processes are implemented, you will transition from an outbound operation to a customer service company with most of your contacts coming from inbound traffic. You will need to consider staffing and agent compensation. If an agent initiates twice as much in payments because it can hand off 40% of its present phone calls to a robot, will they expect more money? Remember that our chatbots can handle complex tasks such as offering a settlement after the other options were declined. You will need fewer experienced agents because your chatbots can handle most of the routine tasks, freeing experienced staff to handle more complex situations. You will be able to replace some of your more experienced collectors with customer service agents, who can always refer complex situations to "Senior account representatives", or even transfer calls to the chatbots, to set up payment arrangements, as as example. Does this work? Yes, we are in various stages of implementing these strategies in different companies. Of course, it does take new thinking, the abandoning of conventional but dated ideas and major change, which can be painful. The comforting thought? That will not be half as painful as losing a lot of money or going out of business!

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Quantrax Corporation is a technology company that created an intelligent collection platform over 25 years ago. They believe that the ARM industry has been poorly served by collection technology that has not evolved or kept up with the great potential of computing power, or challenging industry changes. Self-funded, Quantrax has continued to successfully develop and deploy technology that offers modern solutions to old problems.

www.quantrax.com – (301) 657-2084