Text as a Conversation for Collections

Matt Edmunds

Everyday life is filled with tasks pulling us in all directions. Text messaging provides a way to have a dialogue that more seamlessly fits into our active and “always connected” lifestyles.  A quick reply can resolve an issue while keeping people in step with multiple daily responsibilities.

Besides its wide acceptance in our day to day lives, text has become an effective channel for call center collections. Forrester Research reports that over 23 billion messages are sent every day, and HubSpot found that 83% of text messages are opened within 3 minutes. With these hard-to-ignore statistics, collections organizations are compelled to leverage the power, immediacy and effectiveness of this channel.

And one-way “text blasts” aren’t the only route, as the average person responds to a text message in 90 seconds.  Capitalizing on this immediate response, implementing a 2-way text strategy that allows debtors to interact with an organization can be even more effective in capturing payments.  The responses from an organization can either be automated with canned text replies or actions, or they can be live interactions via an agent communicating directly with a debtor.

One of SoundBite’s financial clients had been using 1-way text payment reminder alerts as part of their collections strategy.  While this was effective in motivating debtors to take action, it still required agent time and effort in order to collect the payment.  This financial institution went on to implement a 2-way text strategy, allowing for both past due reminders and auto-pay options.  They experienced over a 50% increase in same-day payments with this new strategy, demonstrating that while 1-way text is still powerful, 2-way text impacts the bottom line.

SoundBite Communication’s upcoming webinar, “Mobilizing Your Collections Strategy,” will discuss proven strategies, like the example above, used by leading organizations to help mobilize collections outreach that result in a lift in payments.

Please join us for this webinar to learn how your call center can effectively integrate text into its collections strategies: http://sndb.it/5ix