By Michael Magarrell
Time is a valuable resource, especially in a production business. Resources spent dialing, answering, negotiating, and closing payments have measurable value. Resources spent dialing outdated numbers, speaking with wrong party contacts, and buying/using outdated data are measurable expenses.
When determining who to contact first in a dialing strategy, many agencies use a propensity to pay (PTP) or collect score to concentrate on the accounts with the most potential for payment. Whether one is using a turnkey score from a provider or a proprietary score, targeting the higher propensity to pay accounts makes sense in a dialing strategy. Contact those likelier to pay; collect more money.
What many have missed is applying probability of contact to their dialing strategy. If a consumer can’t pay, it really doesn’t matter how easy one can contact them. If a consumer can pay, but the agency cannot efficiently contact them, it is money left on the table. Resources can be wasted in efforts not likely to connect with a right party contact (RPC). These unproductive dials also delay recovery due to less efficient dialing and especially with the addition of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Regulation F weekly limits on attempts. Delays in the collection process lower urgency and create missed opportunity for payment, which reduces liquidation.
Test portfolios observed over the past two years show the average account has four to six associated phone numbers, primarily from client provided numbers and skip-vendor waterfalls. Many data vendors often give more than one best phone number, adding to the mix. This results in a lot of phone numbers to potentially dial even when a strategy focuses on only top PTP accounts.
The financial services industry is changing to a preference of fewer dials overall but is also looking for increased accuracy of the single best phone number vs. many numbers to try. This drives a changing vision for data providers to only provide the best one or two phone numbers, not append lesser quality numbers to provide a hit. Additionally, if an agency already has the best phone number, the vendor should confirm it, and at no charge.
It comes as no surprise that there is an uptick in interest in a true telephony score, especially in being faced with the CFPB Regulation F 7-in-7 rule. While phone scoring algorithms were originally designed as a Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) risk mitigation solution, these new rules are increasing attention to a “dials made to RPC” and “phones to RPC” ratios versus an industry standard of “hit rate” on phone appends. This new alignment of strategy has elevated telephony scores to be used as an efficiency model in addition to mitigation of TCPA risk.
There is a distinct difference between an internal quality score and a true telephony scoring algorithm that is agnostic to any one source. By scoring all the phone numbers on a portfolio against each other in a balanced method, users do not have to attempt to normalize or standardize different vendor internal quality or confidence models and their comparative likelihood to result in an RPC. Users can then drive efficiency by concentrating dialing efforts only on the higher scored phone numbers of the portfolio. Moreover, they reduce risk by identifying score bands that should have minimal – if any – dialing effort.
Examples of a Phone Score in Production:
When using a phone score, the fine tuning of the provider’s scoring bands will be an important element of the strategy, in some cases even dynamic, as external forces intervene over time. Portfolio types, average age of the consumer, and new rules and regulations are some examples. A call center’s bandwidth for dialing will also be an important determining factor in which scoring bands to dial.
Here we explore an example of the impact that phone scoring can have on dialing strategies:
In a portfolio with a Top 5 domestic agency, 44,484 phone numbers from a five-vendor waterfall as well as client provided phones were scored. Only 28,635 (64.37%) of the phone numbers scored landed in the mid or top bands accounting for 90.23% of the call center’s RPCs. After appending an additional 3,788 phone numbers with better scores, and removing the 15,849 bottom scoring phone numbers, the portfolio dialing strategy was now set for 97.75% of phone numbers scored in the mid and top bands, accounting for 98.99% of the RPCs. This dialing concentration on upper phone scores allows for reallocation of the resources that would have been used dialing the 15,849 phone numbers in the bottom of the phone scoring bands. The risk of wrong party contacts is also mitigated.
Further benchmarking of an additional portfolio in a live pilot yielded these results:
- 6,115 unique phone numbers.
- 8,000 attempts to contact made during disposition testing.
- 855 RPCs were recorded during disposition testing.
Score Band Utilization vs RPCs Captured
Using an accurate telephony scoring model, an agency can capture approximately 98% of the RPCs, by targeting only 55% of the phone score range, after fine-tuned to 90-200. In this study, the agency had more quality phone numbers to start but was still able to remove 924 of the 6,115 phone numbers and 1,152 dials from the agents’ workload. Moreover, the data showed dials to almost 50% of the wrong phone numbers can be eliminated after fine-tuning strategies and reducing time and risk spent on wrong party contacts. Phone scoring can optimize the dials and create positive contacts with the population they seek to serve.
Taking full advantage of Phone Scoring
For a further step in building a comprehensive dialing strategy, agencies can consider building a dual phone score matrix and take advantage of collectability and contact probability. Being able to find the consumers who can pay that you can readily contact should be a focus. Dual phone scoring is gaining momentum, especially on competitive paper where the first thirty days are crucial and internal phone scores are often still building.
Summary
The vision is simple: Get to the RPC as efficiently as possible. With phone scoring, call centers can reallocate wasted dials previously committed to phones in the lower score bands. This high band concentration reduces wrong number contacts. It can also omit many dials to secondary and tertiary+ numbers that count against Regulation F’s 7-in-7 weekly allotments yet have a low chance of RPC. Beyond the resource savings, agencies can maintain RPCs while raising efficiencies within Regulation F limitations — an added advantage against their competition.