6 Technology-Driven Customer Feedback Tools That Drive Collections Success
In our last blog we shared The Three Top Reasons Why Customer Feedback is Crucial in Collections, so in this blog we’re tackling ‘the how’ and in particular what channels we’ve used to successfully recycle feedback.
Stuck for time? Why don’t you download our FREE whitepaper on leveraging customer feedback? We answer why it’s important, what channels your team can use and provide examples of how we’ve actioned feedback into success.
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The impact of the pandemic has been felt across the globe and throughout all industries including us in Collections.
In the UK the three major lockdowns saw a huge increase in digital adoption for every demographic. People have become more tech-savvy and tech-reliant as they were forced to stay home and go digital.
The Collections industry has needed to embrace the fallout from the pandemic or risk being left behind; with it now being more important than ever to understand the digital habits and preferences of your customers.
A developed feedback loop, or what we call our Continuous Improvement Programme (CIP), where customer information and data is continually funnelled back to our R and D team, helps us develop strategies, programmes and tactics that work in real-time together with the continuously evolving customer trends. This approach has helped us improve ROI for clients and consequently results for their customers.
In this blog post we share with you six of the top-performing digital feedback tools that help us drive success for our clients:
- Webchat
- Digital surveys
- Follow-up emails
- Feedback pages
- heat mapping
- ‘Report a bug’ feature
1. Webchat
In a world that wants instant gratification, speed can be the difference between deploying successful collections tactics and not. Live chat, autoresponders and importantly chat transcripts are fantastic to use for solving issues quickly as well as feeding into long term strategic development.
Live chat avoids the need for customers to be put on hold and conversations can be held between a single collections agent and an average of 6 customers at once, and autoresponders can service a limitless amount. With both live chat and autoresponders, any issue with your services can be identified in real-time and actions can be taken to resolve them.
Also, all chat transcripts can be reviewed to find trends and themes of underlying problems and help develop new strategies for ever-changing markets.
2. Digital surveys
Customer surveys can play a critical role in the development of your collections team’s tactics and strategies. Questionnaires distributed digitally are cost-effective and if you have the correct software programmes running the analysis of the data can be instantaneous and lead to improvements in real-time.
It’s important to remember your customers’ time is important so, make your surveys concise and to the point. Multiple choice questions are great for surface-level data and if you add a non-mandatory comments box you may be able to gain further insight into high qualitative responses.
3. Follow-up emails
Following a customer engagement, their experience (good or bad) will often be at the top of their mind which makes it an ideal time to follow up with an email. This can happen at identified touchpoints in the customer journey or at the very end but it’s important to be consistent so you can measure the feedback against other customers, other tools and feedback loops you’ll deploy.
4. Feedback pages
Digital feedback pages (complaints) or modules can also play an integral role in the feedback loop and CIP. Identifying repetitive issues concerning a specific aspect of your collections service, followed by strong analysis can unearth actionable improvements, quickly leading to smoother and successful customer outcomes.
5. Heat mapping
Understanding customer webpage behaviours helps us understand where we should focus our digital design energy. Heat maps are a brilliant way to understand customer behaviours by tracking where they have scrolled to on pages and what content is or isn’t helpful by tracking where they move their cursor, how long for and where it goes next.
6. ‘Report a bug’ feature
A key feature on any website is the ‘Report a bug’ feature. Though it may seem like a very small part of a website, it can allow immediate fixes to your website and alert your internal teams to problems that may need to be fixed as soon as possible.
Final words from coeo
This is just a snapshot of some of the bespoke digital tools we develop in-house to service our clients and their customers. To find out more just give us a call or drop us a line and speak to one of our friendly agents.
Looking for more on the subject? Listen to our podcast on Feedback channels.