In a previous article, we talked about the 6 components of resilient collections management system. In particular, we discussed the 3 main systems: the dunning and collection system, the dispute management system, and the legal management system. We also touched upon three essential elements in powerful collections management: personalized collections scenarios, automatic action reversal, and the ability to integrate easily with 3rd party systems.
In this article, we will discuss in some detail the question: How does the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system help in enhancing your collection process?
A mutually supportive relationship
It is safe to say that both the collections management system and CRM system play a big role in supporting each other. And to understand how that happens, we will discuss this from both perspectives in detail.
The CRM in collections management
A strong Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy plays a vital role in ensuring the best possible scenario for collecting a customer’s dues. Particularly, it works to establish a customer-centric collection strategy, yet no less effective, as any other part of this relationship,, throughout the stages of the collection process. And it does so in multiple ways.
Knowing your customers better
An essential step in building a successful relationship with your customers is to learn more about them, their backgrounds, their preferences, and their needs. Thus, a powerful CRM system enables you to keep updated records of each of your customers where all these details are appropriately stored, processed, and visualized for your convenient reference.
Carefully tailored products
But of course, it does not just stop here. A powerful CRM system can give you ample insight into your customers’ demographics, cultural, and economic backgrounds. This would allow you to offer them products that best suit each type of your customers' budgets, specific needs, preferences, and cultural backgrounds.
For example, there could be certain products that you offer only to your VIP customers. You could offer another product tailored for young college students that allows them to access the internet with a reasonable speed and bandwidth at an affordable rate. Or you may dedicate a product to army men and women that best suits their budgets and the nature of their job. Another example would be to offer only certain customers, i.e., those with good credit history, postpaid services while requiring others with not-so-great credit history only prepaid services. This should reduce the level of bad debt you will need to deal with later when collecting payments from your customers.
By creating products that best suit each spectrum of customers’ specific economic capabilities, you will have taken a smart step toward minimizing potential bad debt in the future.
Winning your customer’s loyalty
A loyal customer is a paying customer. Therefore, getting your customers to be loyal to your brand and products, and keeping them so, must be at the top of your CRM goals. This is a surefire way to keep them coming for more. Also, it is more likely to save you a lot of headaches in the collection process in the long run.
With a well-founded CRM strategy, chances are you will be more capable of establishing a relationship of loyalty with your customers. As a result, not only will they be more likely to pay you their dues on time, but it will also be easier for you to convince them to buy more of your great, high-quality services.
Listening to your customers closely
Another critical aspect of CRM is giving your customers a variety of ways to contact you when they need to. This is especially important as it allows you to learn about their issues and resolve them just in time before they can hurt their satisfaction. Thus, any damage to your customers’ satisfaction is likely to increase churn and reflect badly on their willingness to pay you for your services which may increase customer delinquency.
So, for example, it would be excellent if you can provide them with a live-chat service through which they can speak to one of your customer support members whenever need be. A live-chat service, though, does not take the place of a customer support hotline so that customers who prefer to contact you by phone can feel free to do so. Moreover, letting your customers reach you easily through the different social media platforms is no less significant.
On another note, you may also consider conducting surveys and questionnaires regularly to assess your customers’ satisfaction with your services. However, you should be aware to use these methods carefully. A survey, for instance, should be made short, snappy, and certainly not intrusively!
One more thing, for all these tools to work perfectly and yield the best results, you should consider implementing them under an omnichannel system where they can work together in harmony. This way, you have a better chance at keeping your customers engaged and happy. And the happier your customers are, the more likely they are to pay you and buy from you.
Sharing relevant details with collection management
A key aspect of successful customer relationship management and an effective collection strategy is knowing the details of your customers, as discussed above.
With this detailed customer insight at hand, you will be more capable of choosing just the right dunning scenario that fits each customer. You will find, for example, that one customer pays the bill happily after the first SMS notification that you send them, whereas someone else needs a bit more than that.
Feeding these details and sharing them with the collections department in your company helps them make more sound decisions in their dunning and collection process even before getting to disputes and legal actions, which can also benefit from such information.
Conclusion
As we have seen, Customer Relationship Management plays a major role in streamlining the collection process by establishing a healthy relationship between you and your customers from the very beginning. Thus, with a solid and dynamic CRM strategy, enforced by a powerful CRM system, you will be more capable of keeping your collection duties under control and your bad debt cases at a very minimum. The secret, thus, is knowing how to always keep your customers happy.
Check out ESKA Digital CRM and what ESKADENIA has to offer in collections management for communications service providers.
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