Automating Collections
Background
An operator was facing significant revenue interruptions owed to clunky and laborious debtor processes. Customers can get in to payment difficulties, or sometimes chose to. When this happens, the billing platforms trigger escalations which then necessitate Agent intervention. Agents were spending up to 2 hours per customer chasing down payments and searching for details over a multitude of systems.
The collection process may trigger Soft or Hard actions, depending on the process being followed. Whether the step was an ‘early cycle’ dunning, or a ‘late cycle’ Barring or Hot-Lining, the process needed to be applied consistently based on process flows. Subjectivity and discretion was to be minimised to exceptional circumstances, so the process needed to accommodate exception management.
Objectives
The Customer engaged We Are CORTEX to help achieve a small group of complicated objectives. These objectives were:
To mitigate the revenue interruptions and improve cash flow.
To remove, or materially reduce swivel chair processes and inefficiency for agents so they can focus on collection activities.
To ensure consistency of process and avoid claims of unfair treatment, or unequal process.
Solution
The We Are CORTEX team devised an Automation solution which would enable the collection team to receive request from billing or Accounts Receivables Platform. Once the process was triggered, an Agent should then be presented with surfaced data and a process to follow. The agent needed to be in receipt of different sets of consolidated information for different processes, but they must always be ready for a specific customer collection action. Importantly, many soft actions could be orchestrated by CORTEX leaving Agents to engage on ‘Super-Agent’ activities.
CORTEX would determine the collection path for the customer, based on the trigger, including whether it needed to be hard or soft steps, and then actions that process including notifying the customer. CORTEX automates checks, for example, to establish whether the payment has been made, ceasing the process and any system level activities it had invoked, once payment or the correction by the Customer has been made.
When the end of the end-to-end Collection process reaches the end of meaningful automation, the critical hard cease or other steps, are escalated for final human intervention.
Outcomes
The Customer achieved all of its objectives and measured the following benefits after POC completion.
A 15% increase in paid bills within 11 months.
A 5% decrease in the amount of debtors being managed at any one time.
Approximate Functional Block Count: 1500
Time to Value: 6 Months