Call Listening and Coaching for Better Collections Quality and Efficiency
A residential leasing agency needed to enhance agent phone skills within their debt collections call center team. After Bridgeforce intervention, the agency’s call quality rose over 90% and the average total time on collections calls dropped by 20%.
Call Center Agents Play Vital Role in Collections Process – And Shine with Refinement
Despite an industry-wide shift to digital technologies and self-serve options, live call center agents still play a key role in the debt collections process. Their refined skillsets handle unique customer situations to find amenable payment plans.
One residential leasing agency recognized the potential of their call center agents and sought to improve recent performance gains from training with ongoing call coaching. The firm had recently moved their collections operations abroad, and the move warranted a good opportunity to assess current collections calls and provide feedback to increase their overall quality and efficiency.
Having worked with Bridgeforce on collections training in the past, the client recruited our team again to provide coaching to their offshore team and cement the previous training. After the engagement, initial results indicated the average call quality increased to more than 90% and the average total time on a call decreased by 20%.
The Collections Call Listening and Coaching Process
In four weeks, the Bridgeforce team needed to assess the competencies of the client’s collection agents, develop coaching materials and job aids to build skills within the team, and design a dashboard for straightforward reporting.
Assessing and Call Listening
The client provided our team with more than 330 recorded calls between agents and customers. We listened and analyzed each call, giving them all a quality score for benchmarking. Then, we provided feedback for improvement on what we heard.
Our advisors also conducted interviews with supervisors to understand their job functions, which would ultimately tailor our coaching materials to their unique needs.
Collections Call Center Coaching
After listening to the calls and understanding the client’s strengths and weaknesses, Bridgeforce advisors designed a 30-day education plan to build call skills with detailed agendas and organized modules on an online library.
Then, we provided more than 50 hours of agent coaching, including weekly “coaching the coach” sessions with three quality coaches, and daily team meetings and listening sessions to share insights.
From our customized coaching, agents had access to useful training materials including:
- Payment solutions reference guides
- A call flow script
- An outline of “the perfect call” to set quality expectations
- Full library of sample calls
To support and coaches agent performance beyond the classroom, we designed performance improvement plans that outlined opportunities for improvement, action steps, commitment levels, and timelines for implementation.
Lastly, we equipped supervisors with several tools to make ongoing coaching easy, including:
- Performance check-in forms for all supervisors to provide monthly agent feedback
- Supervisor transition plans with recorded education sessions and execution plan
- Coaching modules for all quality assurance resources
Reporting and Ongoing Support
To provide full transparency to the executive team, Bridgeforce advisors created a call listening dashboard. This tracked weekly call quality and provided updates to stakeholders.
And finally, before leaving, Bridgeforce advisors recommended numerous internal management process improvements to further ensure the monitoring of call quality continued after the engagement.
Collections Call Quality Soars Above 90% and Calls are 20% More Efficient
The training gave the agents the strong foundation to increasing the quality and efficiency of our client’s collections efforts. The coaching ensured that new communication techniques and call flow scripts from training were being followed and it resulted in a decrease their agents’ average time on calls by 20%. When agents started the training, their average call quality was scored at 74%. At the end of the engagement, call quality increased to 96%.
Additional improvements included:
- One Call Resolution: Increased by 4%
- Average Time on Hold: Decreased by 10%
- Agent Ability to Fact-Find: Increased by 26%
Bridgeforce: A Trusted Advisor for Call Listening and Coaching
The leasing agency asked Bridgeforce to conduct listening and coaching to ensure that their investment in training was effectively embedded in their teams. We were also deeply involved in developing their call segmentation and digital outreach strategies. We became their go-to trusted advisors on all collections contact center matters.
Our collections training and coaching concept is adaptable to any business. If you want to boost the efficiency and quality of your collections call center, Bridgeforce can help. We’ll guide you through the process. Contact us today to get started.
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