Six of the Best - Issue 2 The Customer Journey

Introduction

Welcome to part two of Six of the Best where we explore the Customer Journey, which for us means making it easy for our client’s customers to engage with us.?In this issue we introduce you to Jack Hemblys who has led First Locates efforts to drive improvements in this space.

Jack is the epitome of a rising star, having joined First Locate from university six years ago with a degree in Criminology. In his first role, Jack worked in our Trace Department as a Tracing Agent but his drive for success along with a commercial tenacity has seen him enjoy a series of promotions until today, he is a Deputy Operations Manager with responsibility for a team of more than 50 people.?Jack heads up the “special project” here at First Locate of understanding and improving the Customer Journey

The Customer Journey – Jack Hemblys

At First Locate we are passionate about consistently achieving the best outcomes for our clients and their customers. As a leading debt collection agency, we strive to exceed our objectives and a significant component of how we achieve continuous improvement is to encourage feedback from our customers which in turn provides direction for our innovation and development.

Over recent years the UK economy has seen the population experience financial challenges due to the rise in cost of living and pandemic related issues and in our sector, it is imperative that our strategy and communication capability reflects the importance of engagement whilst making sure we are able to make those engagements purposeful and effective.

Considering these circumstances, we identified that a key business driver was the optimisation of the Customer Journey with First Locate i.e. How do we make our customers experience easier and quicker so that a consumer can achieve their end goal whilst also considering the surrounding regulatory backdrop on topics such as identity verification and affordability. A special projects team has been created within our business to assess any customer feedback and along with additional research and experience improve our strategies, implement new technology either acquired or delivered by our own in-house team or simply amend processes that can help achieve a better outcome, quicker.

What our research found was that most organisations get bogged down by Tech and we wanted to truly leverage it to the benefit of both customers and our colleagues here at First Locate.?Our aim, to be more in tune with our customers by removing waste from processes.

In addition to this research, we take pride that this was not an exec driven initiative, but one where we leveraged from our Investors in People accreditation by drawing from the skills contained within our workforce, perhaps it is this “grass roots” involvement that provides most satisfaction throughout this success story.

We are delighted to share an outline of our first three implementations;

·????????2021 saw the delivery of new functionality within our customer web portal. Consumers now can control their payment plans within a period that suits them (within client parameters, of course) Full visibility of their account details and live updates have also been made available, which removes further need to contact the traditional call centre.?This leads to quicker resolution and a time saving for both the customer and First Locate.

We are seeing greater volumes of on-line account resolution than ever before.

·???????First Locate recognises the importance of an omni channel capability to communicate with consumers how they will be most able and we have invested in technology to help achieve these goals. We have implemented upgrades in the first quarter of this year to our live webchat which utilises our very own Virtual Assistant to answer the simplest of questions and incorporates the creation of links to direct customers to the correct web page to make a query or a payment.

The results have been very encouraging, showing a reduction in average handling time whilst also seeing our agents being two to three times more productive.

The Virtual Assistant has helped us see a self-serve rate jump to 50% and we are one of very few recovery agencies that have this channel in their live production and can confidently say we are the only recovery agency that can offer account level conversations in a live chat environment.

·???????Lastly, we have made changes to our email communications with customers. A full redesign of our layout & content included new technology within our email templates that help guide customers to our website and their customer portal with just a click of a button. This removes the need for them to pick up the phone to find answers to their questions, speeding up the time to resolution and increasing the volume of engagement.

And we are pleased to announce that the team isn't stopping there! Our view is that Customer Journey is a mind set with no end date. We have plenty of new ideas and actions to progress through 2022.

·????????Further improvements and technological advancements in our online customer portal

·????????Implementation of new repayment options that include financial insight

·????????Further research into other omni-channel routes for our customers

·????????Improvements in SMS technology

·????????Telephony Strategy review

Summary

We were proud of how First Locate operated before embarking on the Customer Journey, but we are even prouder of the business we have become by improving how we engage with our clients’ customers and the improved performance we are seeing as a result.

Our Head of Sales, Neil Burrows ([email protected]) will be more than happy to answer any questions regarding how we can embark on the Customer Journey with your business and share with you the same rewards we are currently seeing.

Thanks for reading.?And don’t forget to share and subscribe to our company page so you don’t miss episode 3.