Over the past few years, the entire marketing and advertising industry has been incorporating more and more elements of personalisation into their offerings. And, importantly, scores of companies have committed to using digital touchpoints to engage with their customers, at the best possible point in time, via their preferred channels, using messages specifically tailored to trigger a purchase. When personalisation was still in its infancy, a personal greeting in an email was perceived as revolutionary. Today, that’s taken for granted – as is the personalised customer experience at all touchpoints both in-store and online.
The customer experience is key to revenue growth and the success of the enterprise. Nevertheless, even in 2020, retailers still tended to forget that the customer experience doesn’t end at checkout. The truth of the matter is that your returns management and dunning procedures can quickly destroy all the trust you’ve built up while acquiring new customers and cultivating their loyalty. Most customers feel very uncomfortable talking about debt problems. They feel even more ashamed if they have to talk to someone in person. That’s why it’s so important that when personalisation is incorporated into the dunning processes, this is done with empathy.
Rather than feeling satisfied with existing standardised dunning processes that completely ignore how consumer segments or even individuals typically communicate, you should try to exploit the potential of integrating personalisation into your dunning procedures. After all, you have most likely already spent a lot of time and money attracting these customers and arousing their enthusiasm for your product or service. If a customer happens to miss a payment, it’s important to ask yourself the following questions:
Needless to say, the 18-year old schoolgirl will expect a very different style of writing from a 45-year old management consultant who spends most of the week travelling. At the same time, an 80-year old senior citizen is unlikely to be interested in mobile payments. Not to mention the fundamental difference between a new customer who doesn’t pay the first invoice and a long-standing customer who has, just this once, forgotten to pay.
In essence, when it comes to payment methods, rather than offering all the available payment methods, you should focus on the payment options that the individual customer is most likely to want to use. However, in order to make such predictions and generate personalized pages automatically, a lot of data is required. To achieve this, all the available customer data needs to be linked to each individual dunning activity. The AI systems from collectAI can then trigger a personalised real-time dunning for you, resulting in shorter dunning runs, higher collection rates and significant cost savings. And, you’ve guessed, a positive customer experience.
You can access an overview of the trends discussed in this series and all the other blogs here.
