Transforming Debt Collection and Strengthening Consumer Loyalty through a Combination of AI and the Human Touch

In a rapidly changing market with soaring inflation and rising interest rates, it is important that we, as debt recovery partners, adapt our working methods at the same pace. The payment behaviours we saw 12 months ago look completely different today. By building automation to constantly challenge ourselves and our processes, we ensure that we follow the changes that occur in the market, now and in the future.

For more than 30 years, Alektum Group has refined and optimised our way of handling debt collection cases. We do this by ensuring a continuous process that focuses on improving the customer experience. Customers no longer base their loyalty on price or product. Instead, they stay loyal to companies based on the experience they receive throughout the entire customer journey. But for defaulting payers, the experience doesn’t end simply because a debt collection company takes over the unpaid claim. According to research done by Forrester, 1/3 of customers say they will walk away from a company they love after just one bad customer experience. That’s why it is crucial to always be mindful of each individual person and situation. 

We perform over 20 million activities annually, spread across 14 countries that all have different laws and regulations. With these volumes, it could be easy to forget that behind each case is a person and a unique situation. Additionally, the market and the behaviour of individuals is continuously changing, sometimes very rapidly, and we must adapt to that accordingly.  

Is it then enough to create personas and fixed activity trees that mean that large groups of people are handled in the same way? We don’t think so. The degree of generalisation becomes too high, often at the expense of solution rates and consumer experience. 

AI and behavioural data provide unique customer adaptation

Alektum Group has worked with systematically structured payment- and behavioural data for over a decade, enabling highly customisable action plans. Aspects such as tonality, communication channels, and payment methods are selected individually throughout their personal customer journey.   

We continuously challenge our processes to further strengthen our solution. We do this according to a model we call Champion Challenger. Thanks to Champion Challenger, we can select specific parts of the decision chain that we want to challenge with new ways of thinking. If the new way turns out to give an even better effect, we switch to it. This way, we continuously improve and adapt more quickly to changes in behaviours. Through intelligent automation, we free up the time of our employees to focus on the more complex cases, which enables us to provide a personal and welcoming service to everyone regardless of the situation as we know that many still prefer the human touch. The result? Higher solution rates, a more predictable cash flow, and better customer experiences.