Aspect Outlines Call Center Collection Tips, Wins Award

Collection firms that rely on contact centers for their livelihoods should use four technology-driven analytics to improve their performance, according to Bob Kelly, vice president for the performance edge group at Aspect Software in Chelmsford, Mass. Aspect provides a software platform for contact centers.

Kelly said that as center transaction volumes increase, there often is a lack of forecasting and planning, reporting becomes non-existent or is limited in by a lack of real-time insight, siloed contact center systems require manual report compilation, and technologies don’t support business process initiatives.

By using predictive dialing technology blended with algorithms that record when the debtor was reached via telephone, the collection company can develop a program for the best times to call different debtors, Kelly says. The more successful the collection firm is in reaching the debtor, the better the payment performance is likely to be.

The “successful contact” records also need to be married with workforce management software so that the collection firm has live agents available when calls are made. When a debtor is new (late on one payment), a recording may be enough to prompt payment. But as the days the debt is outstanding continue to grow, it’s more critical to reach the debtor with a live agent on the line.

“Our collections customers have a focus on the delinquent debtor,” Kelly says. “So they’re looking to technology to help enhance their performance.”

Beyond predictive dialing and workforce management, collection firms should also use technologies to measure recording and quality management as well as agent performance management to aid success in collections, Kelly adds.

Kelly will discuss these ideas in more detail in a Webinar on at 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Oct. 9.

Aspect’s Unified IP today received the 2007 Internet Telephony Excellence Award presented by Internet Telephony magazine. Unified IP reduces costs and simplifies administration by offering full functionality on a single server, according to Aspect.

For the enterprise contact center, Aspect Unified IP supports tens of thousands of agents via centrally managed, linked systems. It also offers enhanced hosted capabilities to enable Application Service Providers (ASPs) with multi tenancy, security, and partitioning delivered in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. For all types of organizations, the product empowers IT to select their transport of choice using either open source VoIP, closed source VoIP or traditional voice.

More than 730 contact center sites worldwide and more than 150,000 agents are leveraging Aspect Unified IP. The latest version includes localization in Simplified Chinese. Over the next several months, subsequent releases of the product will include localization for Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Thai, Japanese, Traditional Chinese and Korean.