Collections

Payments are missed for a variety of different reasons, including simple forgetfulness. Tools like Experian’s PowerCurve Collections can equip you with the insight you need to understand changes to your customers’ financial circumstances, helping you choose the right course of action to ensure the debt is repaid.

Moving a debt to collections incurs its own costs – in time, money and resources. PowerCurve Collections is one way to ensure you don’t start unnecessary debt recovery processes, giving you the option to offer your customers a self-service online portal so they can make repayments discreetly and conveniently.

In 2016, over 85,000 US consumers complained about debt collections. The number one reason for those complaints? Being contacted over debts they didn’t owe. If you unfairly penalise your customers by starting an unnecessary collection process, you’ll lose their trust and probably their future business, too.

You need to make sure compliance is at the heart of your collections process – even when safeguarding your business from losses. Data from PowerCurve Collections can help you gain a more accurate view of your customers and ensure your communications don’t breach any regulations.

If you are using data to inform the choices you make when a customer misses a payment (and you should be), it’s critical that it’s complete, correct and up to date. Tools like Aperture Data Studio provide you with all you need to get to grips with understanding your data and identifying areas of improvement.

Trying to combine information held on different databases can make it difficult to get a focused view of your customer. The solution is to use tools that can bring this data together and that provide you with a single customer view (SCV) like Experian’s Aperture Data Studio. This makes it easier to personalise and improve relationships and communication with your customers.

It’s one thing to have the right platform to view, manage and audit your data, but how do you go about improving it? Experian’s solutions link into its own rich datasets. They can process millions of data records across multiple sources in just a few hours to provide you with new sources of data to fill in any gaps and deepen your understanding of your customers.

Staying compliant is a critical part of any business. If you’re looking for a tool that allows you to create custom rules to deliver high-quality reports to regulators, then Aperture Data Studio may be the answer. It also offers a single view of each customer to ensure you meet key regulations.

If you want to resolve debt repayment issues quickly, you need to contact your customers before the situation escalates. Smart tracing systems like Experian’s SuperTrace can help because they cross-reference a range of customer and organisational data to help you verify a customer’s contact details are up to date. They will also alert you if they ever change.

Around 2.6 million people in the UK have moved home in recent times - that’s 11% of the entire population. Understandably, in the hustle and bustle of moving, some forget to tell their credit providers about their new address, resulting in ‘lost’ customers. Thankfully, contact tracing systems, like those offered by Experian, allow you to quickly establish new addresses and phone numbers for your customers.

Make sure you never inadvertently contact the wrong customer. Experian has cross-checking solutions to ensure you’re dealing with the right customer so that all communications are appropriate and compliant.

Staying on the right side of the FCA’s fair treatment of customers regulations means knowing which sources have been used to pinpoint a customer’s address. Experian’s SuperTrace can help with this as it offers a summary of the data used for that purpose, which includes residency score, common occupancy data (i.e., the people someone lives with) and Land Registry property ownership details.

What assets do your customers hold, and how much are they worth? Experian’s Data Enhancement Service provides a profile of each customer’s credit situation along with the tools you need to convert this into a measurable assessment of their ability to pay back their outstanding debt. It’s a crucial tool when deciding your collections strategy.

How much can your customer afford to repay each month? Tools like DebtSense help answer that question and provide you with the knowledge you need to set up a sustainable and fair repayment plan for your customer based on their current financial situation.

Around 40% of the population faced some form of economic shock in 2020, which meant even previously reliable customers fell into arrears. Using a tool like DebtSense to understand your customers’ current financial situation enables you to help them recover by formulating individually tailored repayment strategies.