Who doesn’t get annoyed by the sound of bin lids slamming and bin trucks revving too early in the morning? Similarly, it’s hard not to get hot under the collar when someone calls to collect an overdue debt.
By Ongopotse Motlhanke, CEO of Khumbula Tech
And yet, it’s hard to think of two tasks more vital to civilisation than keeping streets refuse-free as well as keeping us to our financial promises. Collecting bins and collecting debts may be unpleasant, but they’re absolutely necessary.
For an economy like ours limping along at under 1 percent annual growth, debt collecting returns much-needed resources to the economy to power future expansion. It even improves the credit scores and overall financial happiness of those who might never have got their financial house in order without a debt counsellor at the other end of the line.
As we can see above, there are clear benefits to South African consumers taking that call and the advantages of answering extend across all industries.
The simple truth is that buyers and sellers need to speak to each other for the economy to grow. Text is not enough.
Unfortunately, voice call answer rates in South Africa are plummeting and the economy is quite literally the poorer.
Higher premiums happen when insurance firms do less business and cannot more effectively spread risk. Innovation declines when consumers don’t want to hear about it because a minority of outbound call centres have been passing themselves off as individual mobile users.
There are other reasons why consumers are rejecting voice calls at record rates, but many of these boil down to the failure to adopt the latest contact centre technologies that are both more ethical and more efficient. Running a call centre like it’s 1996 is an excellent way to annoy today’s smart, savvy and connected consumers.
There is no excuse to call the same person at 13h14, 13h15, 13h17 and 13h18 (a real-life example). Is this person really likely to answer on the fourth call?
Similarly, is calling from an 010 number range, then switching to 082 and 031 mere minutes later (another actual example) really going to lead to success?
Amateurish practices like these turn ambivalent ‘maybe’ consumers into angry ‘never’ consumers. Similarly, manual call and conversation logging with spreadsheets, manual outbound dialling and call transfers, and managers manually selecting and listening to tiny samples of outbound calls for quality control, are just some outmoded industry practices from yesteryear that are turning-off today’s consumers in droves.
South Africa’s contact sector laggards need to get with it, leave the 90s forever, and join South Africa’s 2025 BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) party where the talk is always around how to ethically boost voice call answer rates.
Consumers answer calls they trust and CLI integrity is key here. Technology must be implemented that avoids spam labelling by providers. Related to this, it is vital to regularly check one’s caller ID reputation and to take concrete steps to correct any substantive issues.
Contact centres must prioritise quality over quantity and recognise that many dumb contact attempts can be replaced by fewer smarter contact attempts that recognise the day of the week and the time of day as it relates to the individual customer. Contact centres – of all organisations – should understand different consumers have different schedules.
A technology-based omnichannel strategy can also increase the chances that the consumer views your call as important.
Here, warm-up text messages can be sent to make the consumer more amenable to answering and automation can be used to send a follow-up email or text. Notably, this offers an alternative channel for communication.
Finally, when the consumer does answer that call, it’s vital to remember that an authentic and personalised conversation is more likely to keep a consumer engaged than a one-size-fits-all script.
To conclude, the right contact centre technology will equip agents with the appropriate data that will include a unified view of the client’s history including past purchases and prior interactions.
A context-rich interaction must be the goal, with added empathy built on active listening that is very important in the South African context.