How Cloud Contact Center Solutions Revolutionize Outbound Billing

Getting paid can be the hardest part of doing business.

From collection agency contact centers to businesses offering reminders and proactive payment assistance, it can be painful to efficiently handle payments with the systems that were once seen as cutting edge.

Enter cloud contact center solutions; a suite of tools designed to make the process of collecting money simple, streamlined, and successful.

We highlight a few ways cloud contact center solutions revolutionize outbound billing below, and at the end, we’ll give you a case study of a real contact center that used these features to deliver better results to their clients.

Let’s dive in.

An IVR System

We’ve written before about how IVR improves customer service and agent productivity, but its benefits extend beyond those areas into outbound billing collections.

Let’s take a look at 2 ways it helps collection agencies improve outbound billing.

Cloud Call Centers Reduce the Cost of Calling Customers

According to Emily Yellin, author of the infamous book Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us:

“A live agent is about $7.50 per call. To outsource to a foreign country is about $2.35 a call. To use one of those voice response systems, the ‘press one for this, the press two for that,’ it’s about 35 cents a call.”

That’s a dramatic reduction in costs.

While we know that businesses can spend much less with the TCN cloud contact center platform, both outsourced and mainland calls can be dramatically reduced with technology that speeds up calls restricted by TCPA and FDCPA, as wells as campaigns that must have special rules applied.

Those savings add up, allowing call centers to invest in other solutions. Trudging through call lists by hand are an absolute relic – but so are many of the call center platforms still floating around businesses, outsourced centers and small offices.

And, because cost-per-call is so important, TCN’s innovative real-time monitoring lets you see – down to the penny – what each call costs for each agent’s attempt, what the live cost of each floor-wide campaign costs. That all gives dialer managers, floor managers and directorship the tools and immediate SLA insights they need to keep the budget razor thin (as well as iron out any performance or procedure issues that might be addressed for boosts in production).

Provide Customers with Flexible Payment Options

Customers can’t always pay their bills when call centers are open during normal business hours. They may need other ways to pay.

If they call the contact center and no one is there to answer the call and take their money, that’s a major missed opportunity.

And not all call centers or businesses operating their own outbound billing can afford 24/7 customer service.

IVR to the rescue once again.

It lets customers pay at times that are convenient for them.

Customers simply interact with the automated software, press a few buttons or speak a few commands, and presto! – billing collected.

And, with TCN’s platform, IVR choices are saved for business intelligence, while calls that must be handled by an agent can be automatically voice recorded, analyzed for emotion, red flag terms, compliance script verification and then transcribed for quick reference – all while automatically redacting sensitive customer information.

SMS Billing

Why call customers when contact centers can text them instead?

Many customers don’t answer calls from any business – it’s a thing (a very popular thing)! But they’ll almost always see a text message.

And they’re more likely to pay their bill when they can do it conveniently without speaking to anyone.

Contact centers can send overdue payment reminders, quick one-tap tools for payments, and any other notification necessary.

Full-Featured Compliance Suite

When talking about outbound billing, it’s impossible not to bring up compliance.

There are many, many regulations that contact centers need to abide by when contacting customers for any reason, let alone bills.

Now, some things call centers will have to take of on their own, like getting consent from customers to call them.

And if contact centers don’t comply, class action lawsuits (and even single lawsuits) can cost a staggering bit of coin. Have a look at the law.

For the following, made in violation of TCPA: Robocalls, or robotexts, can collect between $500 and $1,500 per call or text. The TCPA also lets consumers take legal action against telemarketers who don’t honor the national do-not-call list and collect $500 per call, for every phone call beyond the first one.

To get consent, contact centers will have to build that into their scripts, as Nicole Strickler recommended in our Litigation Defense Webinar:

“If you build consent into your scripts correctly, it can serve as quite the tool in defeating the class action, if your policy or procedure is: every time the collector is speaking to the consumer they say something to the effect of ‘Is this a good number to call you on?’ and the consumer says ‘yes.’”

However, cloud contact center software will have tools for compliance built-in that handle many other things contact center managers don’t have to worry about, like call recording.

Scalable Call Center Software

Cloud contact center solutions are scalable.

This means small and medium-sized businesses can take advantage of enterprise-level features without paying enterprise-level prices.

Contact centers pay for what they need and use.

When they need and use more, they can scale up.

If they realize they don’t need so many features, they can scale down.

Call centers are in complete control over what they’re spending and what solutions they’re using.

Proof that Cloud Call Center Solutions Revolutionize Outbound Billing

No one should simply take our word that cloud contact center solutions improve outbound billing.

They should verify our claims with proof.

Preferably from a source that performs outbound billing.

Well, we have just that kind of evidence.

Contact centers can read this case study on First Collection Services and their experience using TCN software.

Inside the case study, call centers will discover:

• The 4 elements that improved agent efficiency and productivity (while cutting redundancy).
• How First Collection Services reduced customer complaints and created faster issue resolution.
• And much more.

Get your FREE copy of the case study on First Collection Services today!