With more consumers hitting ‘decline’ on calls than ever before, achieving a live conversation with consumers is one of the biggest challenges facing first-party collections. While this can be incredibly frustrating, it shouldn’t deter collectors from finding solutions that work for them. To get you out of the phone tag slump, here are a few ways first-party collections can increase reach without making more outbound calls.

3 Ways to Increase Reach:

1. Enhance your strategy

Strategic planning provides a sense of direction and outlines measurable goals. Without a strong, detailed strategy put into place, it’s hard to delegate what resources should be spent where. For example; say your goal is to reach 25% more consumers this week than you did last week.

• Weak strategy: Your agents continue to use the same calling practices as last week – spending their time calling consumers with no clear direction, strategic methods, or goals.
• Strong strategy: Your agents are prepped with a list of consumers with strong conversion potential and what types of debts they’re collecting on. They have been thoroughly trained to use best practices when speaking with consumers, and are prepared with a script or the technical know-how of navigating through collection calls in order to convert and meet specific goals.

Using a strategy gives a clear definition of what you intended to do, and how to get there. The more direction you give in the strategy, the more efficient your agents will become, and the more reach you will have.

2. Focus on efficiency

Sometimes all it takes to increase your reach is to focus on how you can make your processes more efficient. For those in the ARM industry, inefficiencies are most often found in how our agents are handling calls. An agent with a high average handle time (AHT) has a low capacity for the number of outbound calls they can make and inbound calls they can take – significantly decreasing overall reach. To combat these inefficiencies, it’s important to provide continuous training to agents to ensure they are up-to-date on all processes and procedures. 

3. Leverage Self-Service Technology

Over the last decade or so, consumer demand has shifted from a heavy reliance on agent-assisted channels to a marriage between agent-assisted and self-service channels.  Leveraging these self-service technologies puts the ball in the consumer’s court, letting them call back on their own time when it’s convenient for them. It also allows agents to streamline time-consuming processes and reclaim useful time that could be used elsewhere.

Finding the right self-service technology for your business can be tricky, but DirectDrop Voicemail works well with every business model. DirectDrop Voicemail allows you to…

• Easily contact consumers at scale
• Make four consumer touches for the price of one manual dial
• Generate 4x the inbound calls from consumers seeking resolution

Ready to reach more consumers and free up your agents time? Get in touch with us here or give us a call at  855-910-6706.