Ambition:
One of India’s top-five banks, with a substantial network of over 2,728 branches, faced severe challenges in its debt collection operations. The bank’s fragmented approach involved over 400 field vendors and 4 contact center vendors, leading to low efficiency, limited collection visibility, and a low Collection Confidence Score (CCS).
Issues included high collection costs, a high Cost Per Account Resolved (CPAR), and a low contactability rate of 83% in the Bucket-1 pool. These factors indicated an urgent need for an integrated and innovative debt collection strategy to improve performance and reduce operational costs.
Action:
In close consultation with the bank’s officials, we developed and implemented a comprehensive strategy focused on reducing human effort, lowering the cost of human capital, enhancing transparency, and providing real-time actionable insights:
- Cohesive Pan-India Collections Team: The disjointed operations across field and tele-collections vendors resulted in inefficiencies and inconsistencies. We proposed and established a cohesive collections team covering PAN India, integrating field and tele-collections under a unified framework. We implemented well-defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for contactability, the number of field referrals, and response times, ensuring coordinated efforts and consistent service delivery across all regions.
- Centralized Field Tracking Application: The lack of transparency in managing field representatives’ activities led to inefficiencies.We developed a centralized field tracking app to monitor field representative visits, travel frequency, and the number of collection attempts. This app provided real-time data, enhancing accountability, reducing human effort, and optimizing field operations.
- Low Contactability Rates: . We introduced a humanoid collections platform, designed from the ground up to improve self-cure rates. This automated system offered human-like interactions, achieving a 12% increase in touch-free collections and minimizing the need for direct human contact.
- Improving Contactability: Outdated contact methods further hampered contactability rates. We implemented a dynamic number change GSM gateway to cycle through different phone numbers, enhancing contactability and reducing call rejection rates by increasing the likelihood of successful connections.
- Workflow-Based Call Routing and Agent Assignment: Ineffective call routing and agent assignment led to missed opportunities and inefficiencies. We introduced workflow-based call routing and agent assignment, ensuring timely and varied contact attempts. This approach maximized resource use and improved the success rate of each collection attempt by aligning outreach efforts with debtor behaviors and preferences.
- Reducing Field Referrals: Excessive reliance on field referrals inflated collection costs and complexity. By enhancing tele-collections capabilities with predictive dialing and automation tools, we decreased the necessity for field referrals, thereby reducing human effort and operational costs.
Ambition Realized:
Our close collaboration with the bank’s officials and the tailored solutions we implemented led to transformative results. We achieved a 97% collection rate, reduced the Cost Per Account Resolved (CPAR) by 15%, and improved the contactability rate to 96%. Additionally, we achieved a 33% reduction in field referrals, reflecting significant operational efficiencies and cost savings. Impressed by the efficacy of our solutions, the bank awarded us 80% of the debt collection work, recognizing our contributions to enhancing their debt recovery process.