Why You Need Business Intelligence in Your Collection Business and Ways to Make the Most of It
- November 23, 2022
- Category: Business Intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) is one powerful tool that can help modern collection businesses formulate highly effective strategies to improve their performance and processes. The process of gathering data from disparate sources and examining it leads to a forward-looking view to unlock trends and know what could happen next to get the best possible outcome. When you embed data intelligence into your workflow, process, and business applications, you get to fuel your operations for growth.
To discuss the benefits mentioned above and more, Mike Gibb, CEO, and Editor of AccountsRecovery.net hosted a webinar on the role of BI in modern collection operations. This webinar, which was also sponsored by Provana, discussed how BI can act as the glue to illuminate key performance indicators (KPIs) across modern collection operations and set them up for success. If you missed attending the webinar, here are key takeaways.
BI can help you paint a bigger picture of your organization. By visualizing important metrics such as the number of accounts placed on a year-on-year, quarter-on-quarter, and month-on-month basis, (or the number of calls or letters sent to consumers monthly, quarterly, and yearly) you can get a clear view of your whole collection funnel.
By mining data from important sources, you can also draw “cause and effect” for almost all scenarios. Therefore, BI can help you trace back the root cause of low client confidence, reduced revenue, and your inability to prioritize and identify KPIs which matter the most. By looking at qualitative and qualitative data points, you can even identify information like the best time to call a consumer, account prioritization, vendor performances, ROI from different applied strategies. This can allow you to connect revenue implication and consumer behavior trends with your agents, to make agent-consumer communications more effective.
Predictability is another crucial success indicator for any collection business. Historic data may not always be purist, but it can help you draw a conclusion and make sound predictions. The number of files and lawsuits filed in the last two quarters, your yearly service rate, and your yearly judgment rate, can easily help you predict the revenue of your collection law firm for the next six months based on your historical collection in each legal stage.
Don’t be overwhelmed by the idea of implementing a BI solution in your business. Start with baby steps. BI has the power to let you create hundreds of data dashboards and modify them as per your unique business model. Start with a few dashboards and see wherever data takes you. In the beginning, it makes sense to create separate dashboards for vendor data and internal data and further ask your service provider to drill down these dashboards for you.
Before you implement the solution in your business, take your service provider’s help to standardize your qualitative values and put these categorical values into a regression model or neural network. Other than internal data (such as agent performance data imported from the speech platform), list down data points to be reviewed from the scrub vendor, payroll vendor, email vendor, and text vendor as well as your internal source. Setting the baseline for each data point is also important. Feed what “cost per call” makes sense to your business and project incident data on the dashboard every time this metric goes overboard.
Remember – sometimes BI tools can humble you and enlighten you on the information you didn’t know. So, keep an open mind and challenge the information you see on the dashboard. If something sticks out and doesn’t make sense to you, go back to your data sources, and validate/revalidate them. Identify nonconformities and take corrective actions. If you consistently see a low trend for certain metrics, discuss it with leadership.
Make sure you also understand the relationship between all the data points you are plotting via your BI platform. Understanding the interplay of data is essential for you to find the root cause of a certain trend. For instance, for the analysis of received text messages, you should analyze what can be marked as positive and negative in a standard text message response and periodically revisit the logic to determine if the text message is working as the preferred method of communication for your consumers.
Slowly make BI part of your work culture. This can be achieved by giving everyone (from compliance officer, supervisor, and QA analyst to IT person) in your organization their dashboards.
A Word from Provana
It is not easy to unlock and interpret a high volume of data especially when you have too many systems to integrate and many sources to pull your data from. Advanced business analytics solutions, such as IPERFORM Analytics® (IPA), can help you achieve exactly that. IPA automates all processes associated with the collection life cycle. In a single dashboard, you get a complete glimpse of your collection operations. You can view the aggregate data and then drill down to deeper details of any segment. Is your business analytics platform flexible enough to enable your team to test and adapt collection strategies? If your answer is NO, click here.