Tag: consumer dispute process

Have you seen the latest Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) class action lawsuit? TCPA litigations in the communications, energy and media industries are dominating the headlines, with companies paying up to millions of dollars in damages. Consumer disputes have increased more than 500 percent in the past five years, and regulations continue to tighten. Now more than ever, it’s crucial to build effective and cost-efficient contact strategies. But how? First, know your facts. Second, let us help. What is the TCPA? As you’re aware, TCPA aims to safeguard consumer privacy by regulating telephone solicitations and the use of prerecorded messages, auto-dialed calls, text messages and unsolicited faxes. The rule has been amended and more tightly defined over time. Why is TCPA compliance important? Businesses found guilty of violating TCPA regulations face steep penalties – fines range from $500 to $1500 per individual infraction! Companies have been delivered hefty penalties upwards of hundreds of thousands, and in some cases, millions of dollars. Many have questions and are seeking to understand how they might adjust their policies and call practices. How can you protect yourself? To help avoid risk for compliance violations, it’s integral to assess call strategies and put best practices in place to increase right-party contact rates. Strategies to gain compliance and mitigate risk include: Focus on right and wrong-party contact to improve customer service: Monitoring and verifying consumer contact information can seem like a tedious task, but with the right combination of data, including skip tracing data from consumer credit data, alternative and other exclusive data sources, past-due consumers can be located faster. Scrub often for updated or verified information: Phone numbers can continuously change, and they’re only one piece of a consumer’s contact information. Verifying contact information for TCPA compliance with a partner you can trust can help make data quality routine. Determine when and how often you dial cell phones: Or, given new considerations proposed by the CFPB, consider looking at collections via your consumers’ preferred communication channel – online vs. over the phone. Provide consumers user-friendly mechanisms to opt-out of receiving communications At Experian, our TCPA solutions can help you monitor and verify consumer contact information, locate past-due consumers, improve your right-party contact rates and automate your collections process. Get started

Many data furnishers are experiencing increases in dispute rates. It’s a tough spot to be in. Data furnishers are not only obligated under the FCRA to investigate and respond to all consumer disputes – reviewing every Automated Consumer Dispute Verification – but they must also do so within less than 30 days. As the number of disputes rise, resources become taxed and the risk of not meeting Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) obligations increases. Let’s face it, consumer disputes aren’t going away, but understanding the reported data and metrics behind disputes can help data furnishers minimize them and defend reporting strategies and processes. 5 Way to Uncover Data Inaccuracy 1. Gain perspective against the industry and peers. Depending on the industry you service, the general benchmarks for dispute rates can vary. It’s important to understand where you fall in regards to dispute rates. Are you trending high or low? As an annualized average, we’ve recently experienced the following industry dispute rates through the end of the year: However, industry averages are just the tip of the iceberg. Measurement against peers can provide a clearer picture of where you fall. Are you an outlier or on par? How do you respond in comparison to peers? Are you deleting the trade as the result of the dispute at a higher rate? This could be an indicator of a systemic problem that needs addressing. 2. Implement pre-submission quality checks. Once you know where you stand, make sure your data is accurate before it heads out the door and hits the consumer’s credit report. Implement manual checks against Metro 2 rules. Build SQL queries to perform your checks. Better yet, use data validation software to automatically identify, track and remediate errors before sending the file to the bureaus. These steps can catch disputes before they happen. 3. Review any data being rejected after submission. Even if your new reporting motto is ‘know before it goes’; once the data has been transmitted, you’ll still want to monitor data being rejected due to Metro 2® errors. When data is rejected that means the update you provided did not make it to file. This leaves room for disputes. Incorporating a robust review of all rejected data in a timely and detailed manner, with updates made before the next reporting period, can improve the accuracy of your data. 4. Audit to identify and correct any stale data on file. An audit for any stale data  - which includes open accounts with a balance greater than zero that have not been updated recently - should be performed at least annually. Review, research and remediate any outdated data that could affect your customer, making it susceptible to a dispute. 5. Educate your customers. Why are your customers disputing? Are there common themes within your customer base? Often, a dispute can be eliminated before it happens, with some explanation on the way an account is reported. By providing proactive access to materials and resources that help demystify the credit reporting process, a potentially negative interaction can be turned into a positive learning opportunity, helping the overall customer experience. Learn more about data accuracy solutions.

The market is inevitably changing, and while batch and daily alerts are still effective in tackling client and consumer challenges, you are probably seeing more real-time alerts. Perhaps you were at the auto dealership applying for a car loan and you got an instant alert on your mobile app revealing there was an inquiry pulled on your credit report.  Or maybe you applied for a credit card online and instead of waiting for weeks to see if you got approved, you receive notification on the spot. It’s official. We live in a world where we want immediate and instant feedback, communication, and decisions. From a client’s perspective, this means getting a credit-event alert on a customer now vs. 24 hours later. Delays can sometimes mean the difference of losing or retaining a customer. In a recent Experian survey, findings revealed consumers expect to be notified of changes to their credit profile as they occur in real time. In fact, 90 percent of Experian Members said they place a “high value on real-time alerts.” To meet these consumer expectations, clients can consider implementing a trigger solution to offer real-time notifications on inquiries, security alerts and consumer disputes. These triggering events are pushed in real-time as opposed to a 24- to 48-hour turnaround when using standard daily triggers. What are inquiry and security alert triggers? Inquiry triggers cover 13 different industries and also fraud, theft, and active-duty military alerts. They are designed specifically for financial institutions that wish to monitor their existing customer base for account management, and for consumers wanting immediate awareness, education, and protection of their credit. How do real-time triggers work in the consumer dispute process? Dispute updates can be pushed out to the consumer in real-time as opposed to the standard dispute process that takes up to 30 days to receive an update. These triggers also include freeze, thaw and lift alerts pushed in real-time as opposed to the typical 24- to 48-hour turnaround when using standard daily triggers. These alerts are designed specifically for consumers wanting immediate awareness, education, and protection of their credit. Other than the speed of delivery, are there any other differences between daily vs. real-time triggers? Instead of having the files run nightly with the trigger report being sent to the client every morning through a STS delivery method, the real-time events are pushed via Cloud or STS delivery method.  Clients can retrieve these events at their own pace. Implementation time takes around two weeks. Are there additional opportunities to utilize real-time triggers? In addition to real-time inquiry alerts designed for companies to monitor their existing customer base for retention purposes, Experian also offers real-time inquiry alerts for prospecting and marketing purposes. This means financial institutions can identify which consumers are shopping for new credit in real-time.  As a result, immediate firm offers of credit or cross-sell offers could be sent to consumers before it’s too late.