By: Wendy Greenawalt
Given the current volatile market conditions and rising unemployment rates, no industry is immune from delinquent accounts. However, recent reports have shown a shift in consumer trends and attitudes related to cellular phones. For many consumers, a cell phone is an essential tool for business and personal use, and staying connected is a very high priority. Given this, many consumers pay their cellular bill before other obligations, even if facing a poor bank credit risk. Even with this trend, cellular providers are not immune from delinquent accounts and determining the right course of action to take to improve collection rates. By applying optimization, technology for account collection decisions, cellular providers can ensure that all variables are considered given the multiple contact options available.
Unlike other types of services, cellular providers have numerous options available in an attempt to collect on outstanding accounts. This, however, poses other challenges because collectors must determine the ideal method and timing to attempt to collect while retaining the consumers that will be profitable in the long term. Optimizing decisions can consider all contact methods such as text, inbound/outbound calls, disconnect, service limitation, timing and diversion of calls. At the same time, providers are considering constraints such as likelihood of curing, historical consumer behavior, such as credit score trends, and resource costs/limitations. Since the cellular industry is one of the most competitive businesses, it is imperative that it takes advantage of every tool that can improve optimizing decisions to drive revenue and retention. An optimized strategy tree can be easily implemented into current collection processes and provide significant improvement over current processes.
