World Class City Council
Improve Debt Collection at 50% Lower Cost with CONTACT
Summary
One of the UK's largest councils manages thousands of properties
throughout the city and continually faces the challenge of
collecting overdue rent from council housing tenants. The process
for chasing up late payments was cumbersome and costly: agents
would call, write letters or arrange home visit collections.
Seeking a better alternative, the Council turned to Datasquirt and
implemented CONTACT SMS. The solution offered an easy way to
contact all tenants in arrears and request that they call the
Housing Department to arrange a payment schedule.
CONTACT proved immediately effective: more than 42% of tenants
responded to pay, made arrangements for payments or notified the
council that a payment had been issued. Additionally, although the
SMS requested a call to the Housing Department, 10% responded
directly by SMS, which reduced in-bound calls and the associated
agent time.
Situation
The council faced several business challenges:
- Ineffective debt collection. The Council used
a variety of methods to remind tenants of late payments: phone
calls, letters and house visits. This effort was difficult and
costly to manage.
- Staffing limitations. The Council had a
limited number of contact centre staff to manage both inbound and
outbound calls; individual communications are timeintensive, many
tenants didn't have landlines and were difficult to reach.
Datasquirt Solution
The council implemented the Datasquirt CONTACT SMS solution
for:
- SMS notifications of overdue rent
payments which included a request to call the Council's Housing
Department
The solution offered an easy way to reach all tenants in arrears
in a non-confrontational way. The results were immediate: 42%
responded to say they will pay, had made a payment or would like to
arrange a payment schedule. Additionally, 10% responded by SMS and
many reported failed attempts to reach the contact centre due to
high call volumes. The SMS responses highlighted a contact centre
issue and the SMS broadcast also returned inactive phone numbers,
identifying numbers that were no longer in use.
Benefits
The Council experienced immediate ROI and benefits from the
CONTACT solution:
- Improved debt collection. 42% of council
housing tenants responded to SMS to schedule payments.
- Reduced costs. CONTACT SMS is an estimated 50%
less costly per contact and less than 23 pence per communication
with customers.
- More effective, non-confrontational
communication. SMS broadcasts are easily managed and are
better received by endusers.
View the
demo or contact us to find out more.
