All posts tagged management

The Evolution of Collections Technology

by Brian Moore on July 1, 2011 in Brian Moore, Varolii News with 1 Comment

One of the few advantages of getting older (or just plain old as my son's remind me) is it allows you to look back over a longer time frame to observe how things have changed, especially when the changes are gradual rather than abrupt.

I shared the following slide with the members of the Telecommunications Risk Management Association (TRMA) at their conference in San Francisco this week. It illustrates some of the major changes in the technology of collections over the 30 years I've been in the industry, and the impact they have had on the productivity and size of collections operations.

trma collections results1 The Evolution of Collections Technology

Do you think I am overstating the impact by suggesting that collections operations today are over ten times more productive (and thus less than one-tenth the size) than they were 30 years ago?

In some companies, perhaps.

But here are two factoids that support my assertion:

  • Account to collector ratios (ACR) in 1980 were measured in the low hundreds. Now they are more typically in the low thousands. TRMA’s own benchmarking data shows the ACR in their industry has increased 33% in just the last six months!
  • I have met with three large issuers of consumer credit in the past month who have no collectors at all! Sure, they outsource some of their customer contact to a third party servicer, but they are also heavy users of self-service automation that dramatically reduces their need for human agents. And their losses are lower than their industry averages, perhaps because management attention is more focused on optimizing their strategies and tactics rather than hiring, training and retaining FTE.

I started my career as a collector in 1980, tearing off my daily printout of delinquent accounts, pulling my history cards, then “smiling and dialing”. After a few years of this drudgery and then managing the same, I decided to spend the rest of my career driving technology and productivity into the process, the last 10 years with Varolii. I’m proud of the progress we’ve made together in driving collections efficiency, and we’re working hard to make this decade the most productive ever.

Have a happy Independence Day and raise a toast to American ingenuity!

How To Avoid Becoming an Overwhelmed Call Center Professional

by Mary Cook on May 30, 2011 in Call Centers, Consumer Svcs, Mary Cook with 2 Comments

Communication Madness

After speaking to my peers the past few months, I have come to the conclusion that we are all suffering from the same affliction– it’s the “OMG! How do I keep UP?” disease.

Many of us call center and customer experience professionals are overwhelmed. Aside from trying to manage day-to-day operations, we are consistently being flooded with new processes and communications that we need to support from Continue reading →

Cloud computing implementation increasing among large firms

by Varolii on December 17, 2010 in Airlines, Banks/Finance, Consumer Svcs, Healthcare, Industry News, Mobile/Telcom, Retail, Utilities with No comments

Techies and IT professionals have recently been touting the benefits of cloud computing for furthering communications software and operations, and a recent survey shows that adoption rates will only increase through 2011.

A new study by Management Insight on behalf of CA Technologies has found that more than 80 percent of enterprises and 92 percent of large enterprises have at least one cloud service, and 53 percent of IT professionals said that they have more than six cloud services.

Companies have been adopting cloud services for a variety of reasons, the report found. Forty-four percent of respondents reported that saving money was their primary incentive for adopting the technology, followed by 35 percent who cited increasing efficiency and 34 percent who want to work with the latest technologies.

"It validates a trend we predicted, that IT executives are rapidly becoming orchestrators of an IT supply chain made up of internal and external services. With this shift comes a growing need for sophisticated management and security, allowing enterprises to change how they think about IT to reap the full rewards that cloud computing offers – agility, efficiency and scalability," said Adam Famularo, general manager of cloud computing business for CA Technologies.

The technology has become so popular in the IT world that the website ITBusiness recently named the program its Newsmaker of the Year.