In recent years, the fields of learning design and employee coaching have been revolutionized, with technology playing a major role in enabling long-standing principles of education to be applied for better-than-ever business results.
Consider personalization: Great teachers have always recognized that different students have different learning styles, paces and strengths. Some students may absorb detailed material in a single pass, while others may need to review complex material a number of times. In many situations, however, time and staffing limit the degree to which curricula and their delivery can be personalized to meet the needs of different trainees.
Likewise, professional trainers have long known that providing timely and relevant feedback reinforces learning, increases engagement and fosters continuous improvement. But until recently, it has been tough to do so promptly and objectively, especially at scale.
Coaching, Transformed
Thanks to modern technologies – the web, video tools, interactive gaming – that has all changed. Interactive learning applications are designed to address specific learning challenges that individuals encounter. They empower each individual to progress at their own pace, with instant feedback at every step.
Today it’s hard to imagine coaching for sports or public speaking without the real-life recordings that allow coaches and individuals to vastly improve performance by watching to see what works well and what must be improved.
Business coaching has followed a similar path. For many customer-facing organizations, agent performance is a critical success factor. Coaching is particularly crucial for agents in highly regulated industries, when going off-script could result in significant compliance and litigation risk.
For Debt Collection, Coaching Makes All the Difference
Among the numerous organizations that require well-trained agents, debt collection operations are perhaps the most dependent on their agents’ skill – and at greatest risk if they are not optimally trained. An effective training program for debt collection agents must achieve three primary goals. It should:
- Ensure that agents have full command of compliance obligations to minimize risk
- Improve agents’ communications and rhetorical skills to increase Promise To Pay (PTP) rates
- Coach agents in developing the empathy and psychological fortitude to handle potentially unpleasant situations such as delinquencies, while training them to interact respectfully and effectively with vulnerable people
Fortunately, today a new generation of coaching tools leverages advanced training techniques to meet the unique challenges of ARM industry businesses. How can your organization choose the right one for its particular needs?
Selecting a Coaching System
Is it video-assisted?
According to research, learners are likely to remember 10% of the material they read, 65% of visual content – and a full 95% of content they learn from audio-visual presentations. Because video holds learners’ attention to an extent that other media can’t match, video-assisted coaching is an effective independent learning tool for remote worker onboarding.
Does the coaching system integrate with your monitoring system?
Seamless integration between coaching and monitoring systems creates valuable synergies. Based on monitoring data covering each individual’s challenges, an integrated coaching system can tailor bespoke paths that address each agent’s needs, and provide on-target feedback and encouragement.
How quick is the feedback cycle?
At today’s hyper-efficient call centers, any delay in providing feedback about a specific incident means that an agent may conduct numerous additional high-risk or low-performing conversations before being set straight. In addition, when a misstep is only addressed after days or weeks, incident details have faded from memory and feedback effectiveness is diminished. Look for a solution that flags challenges in real time to increase the speed and impact of feedback and reduce repeat offenses.
How easily can managers share the problematic instances with the agent?
QC managers’ days are already filled with tedious tasks. Manually cutting flagged instances and sharing them with relevant agents shouldn’t add to their load. Instead, chose a system that automatically extracts audio snippets of problematic interactions and shares them with the right recipient to save time and reduce management burden.
Can coaching progress be tracked?
Look for a coaching solution that lets you easily monitor and document coaching progress on multiple levels – individual, team and full center operations.
Does the solution include a library of ARM-specific coaching?
Between onboarding new employees and keeping existing agents up-to-date, coaches usually have their hands full. Make sure that the solution you choose comes with a library of videos that cover compliance guidelines relevant for the ARM industry. With the basics covered, you can focus your scarce time on adding agency-specific guidelines.
Coaching, the Sedric Way
For collection operations, excellent coaching is an essential factor for success. Video-assisted, personalized solutions can drive revenues by improving agent performance and reducing risk and legal costs.
That’s why we built a coaching module into the Sedric platform. Data on errors, violations and missed opportunities that is gathered during the AI-based monitoring process flows seamlessly to our training engine, which tailors individual coaching paths to address each agent’s needs. A library of bite-sized videos that engagingly explain FTCPA rules comes with the system, and coaches can easily create additional videos using avatars of their choice. Dashboards make it simple for coaches and leaders to follow up on process, with coaching and remediation efforts automatically documented for audit trails.
New technologies make coaching more engaging, impactful and effective than ever before. Integrating these technologies with communications and compliance monitoring systems creates a virtuous cycle of feedback-driven improvement that empowers savvy ARM industry businesses to pull ahead of the pack. Isn’t it time that your organization started enjoying the competitive advantages that coaching technology integration can bring?
In recent years, the fields of learning design and employee coaching have been revolutionized, with technology playing a major role in enabling long-standing principles of education to be applied for better-than-ever business results.
“Training and monitoring of consumer-facing employees will be critical to ensure that an organization is compliant. Technology will support and help the credit and collections industry meet demanding obligations with ease and efficiency, in order to produce the outcomes a regulator wants to see.”
Consumer Financial Services Regulatory & Compliance Group
Clark Hill
“Our challenge going forward is to position our industry and our companies as desirable places to work. We must implement diversity, equity and inclusion in our workplaces, and get the word out that we have changed. Ask your newest employees for feedback—what would make our workplace desirable for their friends and acquaintances? In this post-pandemic world, getting people to crawl out of their comfortable cocoons may be difficult, but it can be done!”
CACi
“In the last few years, the buzz of the call centers faded away. Now that many people still have the opportunity to continue to work from home, performance directors need to pivot their focus. We need to ensure that the training is effective in this new environment. The move is from hours in a classroom setting to immediate, personalized micro-learning units that enforce the corrective behaviors.”
Resurgent Capital
“The digital collections movement continues to be in full steam and we are excited to see all of the new technologies that are coming into the ARM industry to help drive enhanced collection performance in a compliant manner. We anticipate additional M&A consolidation globally in the ARM industry, as more digital ARM companies look to accelerate market entry and obtain blue-chip clients and deploy digital-first solutions.”
“Digitization will be critically accelerated in 2023. Recovery organizations may be required to furnish consumers’ account data through consumer-selected platforms that will likely be different from organizations’ traditional payment portals. Organizations should start preparing their technology and operations for that contingency now to harness the trend to their benefit.”
Kredit
“Data is the new oil, and extracting data from all sources, especially voice, will be a must-have in 2023. We are in the age of machine learning, and ML runs on data. Getting ALL the data and getting it into one place for the ML to do what it can are the key differences between organizations that will make it and those that don't.”
Indebted
“In 2023, collectors and creditors will be required to work closer together. Reg F oversight requirements have created a new reality of shared compliance responsibility. Servicers and creditors can better collaborate by using new data-driven compliance platforms that provide all parties with critical insights and generate the transparency and trust needed to succeed in a tightening regulatory climate.”
As Gen Z enters the workforce, you’ll have up to four generations in your agency. Everyone learns differently. Young people learn from TikTok videos, and there is a professional term for this: micro-learning. Such short videos are especially efficient when sent out close to the time when the violation occurred.
Barron & Newburger
The most efficient training systems I’ve seen are those which build surgical, data-driven compliance content and provide agents the exact training they need when they most need it. This approach avoids wasting time and money on training which does not address the need. Continuous, role-based training programs that focus on the needs of each individual agent are some of the most efficient and effective I’ve seen.
Bedard Law Group
“Training is only going to be effective if it's done at or near the time the violation occurred. As agents handle hundreds of calls a week they will not have the capacity to remember particular moments of each consumer interaction. Therefore, effective monitoring will be critical to address the deficiency when it happens, in order to remediate quickly so that it does not become a systemic problem going forward.”
Consumer Financial Services Regulatory & Compliance Group
Clark Hill
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