National Australia Bank, one of the four largest financial institutions in Australia, auto-resolves 75% of delinquent conversations with customers while maintaining its posture as a leader in customer care. The bank has done this by harnessing the power of FICO's Customer Communication Services (CCS) to bring analytically-driven automation to its collections process.
The implementation has resulted in 75% automation of all cases, a lower cost-to-collect and reduced impairment. It has also produced a Net Promoter Score of 63. That means that 63 out of every 100 customers handled in NAB Collections would promote their positive experience to others. Now there’s a thought, brand promotion from those you might not expect!
Previous to the move to analytically-driven collections, NAB was using an inefficient dialer and SMS platform. They needed a lot of people to service customers and a lot of the calls weren't very effective. In the past NAB's collections staff were forced to have uncomfortable conversations with customers. The associate would be mandated to ask the questions, 'why they hadn't paid?', 'when they were going to pay?' and even 'how they were going to pay?' which would make the customers frustrated.
Working with CCS, the bank was able to make the entire approach more sophisticated. The actions taken by CCS are now fed back into the core systems so that NAB doesn't contact the customer subsequently, breech debt collection guidelines or create a poor customer experience. The bank's collections department is now operating extremely efficiently. Its staff engagement has gone up significantly, its customer engagement has gone through the roof, its rate of staff attrition has dropped, its opex has dropped and its levels of bad and doubtful debt have dropped.
“We were recently recognized in Fortune 500 Magazine as one of the top performing companies in the world in terms of customer care,” said Jonathan McCleery, Design and Innovation Manager at National Australia Bank. “And we look at what we have done in automation as a major contributing factor to that.”
