How our offshore contact centre team in South Africa exceeded collection targets for a UK vehicle finance lender
Overview
On the back of our existing long and fruitful outsource partnership with a retail bank, we were recommended to deliver collection services for a UK vehicle finance lender. Both the retail bank and the vehicle finance lender sit under a larger FTSE 250 bank. The service operates from our offshore contact centre in South Africa.
Challenge
The client specialises in providing responsible vehicle finance to people who may be finding it difficult to get the loan they need. Our team had an extra responsibility to ensure all discussions with the customer were conducted with fairness and empathy, as well as flexibility and enough knowledge and seniority to come up with workable solutions to help customers maintain their payments and keep their vehicle.
Solution
Collections requires a level of care and attention that goes beyond the normal contact centre requirements and training. At Sigma Connected, we’re experts in handling payment collections in a way that carefully balances client needs as a business with the wellbeing of customers. That’s why we were able to quickly onboard this new client at the end of 2021 and hit the ground running with a team of 15 highly trained customer advisors and leaders. This team soon grew to 20 as our team took on more calls and workload and we were asked to extend operating hours.
We believe in true partnership working and collaboration right up to senior level. We like to run as an extension of our client’s own operations, as colleagues. And this was no exception. Thanks to such a close working relationship, and transparency, we instilled a level of confidence in our client to trust us with more and more. In turn, we invested in our team to continuously grow their abilities and responsibility.
Result
Our team consistently meets, or exceeds, the client’s quality targets, ensuring fair customer outcomes and a good experience. This is achieved at a significant reduction in operating costs (labour cost c.50%) by using our South African operation.
Additionally, the target ‘kept rate’ on payment arrangements is met, which shows that our team is able to listen to, and work with customers to agree plans that are affordable.
The client has been so delighted with our operational delivery that they are now expanding the team again and using additional services we provide in the areas of application processing support and call QA.
