My partners in the UK recently had a bank management consulting engagement in the UK. It was in their collections department. Just as with another UK bank, as soon as the customer misses a payment, the IT system starts a predefined lettering campaign. If this does not prompt the customer to pay then the computer pops the account onto an agent’s screen and the agent’s job is to get money right then and there over the phone. Details of the payment taken are fed into the computer and it decides when to make the next call with the same (‘collections’) purpose. What was most frustrating for customers was that if they called to say they had a problem paying before they had missed any payments there was nothing agents could do to help because the customers weren’t in the correct IT system.
You only had to listen to calls to learn how awful this was from the customers’
point of view. It wasn’t unusual for customers to avoid the call, knowing it
meant grief and in their words ‘to be treated like a criminal’. Agents were
measured on calls made, money collected and were incentivized to collect the
most money. No surprise there.
What had been completely forgotten was why customers were in arrears. The
reality was most of these people had experienced either a minor cash flow
problem or had a major life changing event (divorce, serious
illness, etc). Yet the system was designed to treat them all the same.
We helped them redesign the service, to make it work from the customers’ point
of view. The first contact was a problem-solving contact: Hi, you missed a
payment, is there a problem, can we help? Instead of following rules, agents
were to help the customer solve the problem, and there were no constraints;
they could re-structure debt, repossess the item bought (for example the car)
and so on.
The results were astonishing. The agents collected more money and the customers were happier – without prompting, many told the agents how impressed they were with the service. What’s more we showed this design could be delivered with only 30% of the agents. Delivering the service against customer demand meant the removal of massive volumes of failure demand and other types of waste. So, a major change: massive improvements in collections, vast improvements in
efficiency and huge improvement in customer service. Furthermore agents were
happier, for now they were doing a much more interesting and worthwhile job.
The only down side was the solution meant the computer system would be redundant, it meant managers would have to confess to their board that last year’s
multi-million pound investment in technology was a waste. What did they do?
Nothing. The redesign was dropped.
Deming used to say doesn’t anybody give a hoot about profit? All the customers
wanted was a conversation that would help them solve their problem. But banks seem to be designed on the assumption customers are delinquent.
The customer management process was improved without changing technology. The move from a command and control environment to systems thinking can bear fruit and save on technology that is not needed. However, this will require new thinking and innovative leadership.
You only had to listen to calls to learn how awful this was from the customers’
point of view. It wasn’t unusual for customers to avoid the call, knowing it
meant grief and in their words ‘to be treated like a criminal’. Agents were
measured on calls made, money collected and were incentivized to collect the
most money. No surprise there.
What had been completely forgotten was why customers were in arrears. The
reality was most of these people had experienced either a minor cash flow
problem or had a major life changing event (divorce, serious
illness, etc). Yet the system was designed to treat them all the same.
We helped them redesign the service, to make it work from the customers’ point
of view. The first contact was a problem-solving contact: Hi, you missed a
payment, is there a problem, can we help? Instead of following rules, agents
were to help the customer solve the problem, and there were no constraints;
they could re-structure debt, repossess the item bought (for example the car)
and so on.
The results were astonishing. The agents collected more money and the customers were happier – without prompting, many told the agents how impressed they were with the service. What’s more we showed this design could be delivered with only 30% of the agents. Delivering the service against customer demand meant the removal of massive volumes of failure demand and other types of waste. So, a major change: massive improvements in collections, vast improvements in
efficiency and huge improvement in customer service. Furthermore agents were
happier, for now they were doing a much more interesting and worthwhile job.
The only down side was the solution meant the computer system would be redundant, it meant managers would have to confess to their board that last year’s
multi-million pound investment in technology was a waste. What did they do?
Nothing. The redesign was dropped.
Deming used to say doesn’t anybody give a hoot about profit? All the customers
wanted was a conversation that would help them solve their problem. But banks seem to be designed on the assumption customers are delinquent.
The customer management process was improved without changing technology. The move from a command and control environment to systems thinking can bear fruit and save on technology that is not needed. However, this will require new thinking and innovative leadership.
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