Globe Telecom (Globe), one of the major telecommunications services providers in the Philippines, has reduced account delinquencies by 40 percent year-on-year, since its deployment of FICO® Customer Communication Services (CCS) in 2016. By automating a portion of its collections efforts, the company has also managed to reduce the cost to collect by 15 percent and the time it takes to collect by three days.
For its achievements, Globe won the 2017 FICO Decisions Award for Debt Management. The introduction of the CCS solution was seen as essential to cope with Globe Telecom’s rapidly growing business. With more than 59 million mobile customers, and more than 1.2 million broadband customers, Globe had to scale its collections efforts quickly while considering cost and improving customer care.
Customer experience was central to the improvements of Globe Telecom’s operations. Prior to the use of the FICO solution, Globe relied on outbound phone calls. The collections team struggled with customers who were unhappy with the contact process. Among the most prevalent complaints were cases where customers felt harrased or spoken to in a rude manner by agents. While the company needed to improve collections performance, it also had to ensure customer satisfaction.
With the FICO solution, the company now utilizes a multi-channel customer engagement system for collections. This change has helped keep the collection rates high through a clever and systematic system that allows the collections team to follow up with customers at the right time, using the right channel and with the right message.
By leveraging FICO’s decades of experience in customer collections and its automated system incorporating machine learning, sophisticated analytics and existing models, Globe was able to expand and future-proof its business.
The flexible and scalable FICO solution expanded the contact strategy to include additional customer engagement channels like SMS, email and interactive voice response (IVR), which when mixed with sophisticated analytics meant it could perform collections to the same standard as an actual agent.
“This use of ‘machine calling’ instead of traditional ways of agents calling customers was an innovation in itself. Though it was a new kind of technology, the roll-out turned out to be a success that revolutionized the way we do business,” said Mon Pernia, head of consumer collections at Globe. “Today, we are better equipped to manage our collections, improve collections performance, increase customer satisfaction, and finally decrease churn and costs dramatically.”
Post-implementation, Globe Telecom’s Net Promoter Scores (NPS) improved. Its NPS continues to improve month-on-month and the business has seen the lowest levels of customer complaints and customer churn to date. The use of the CCS solution has shown that most customers at early-stage collections prefer communication via SMS and the ability to address the matter without an awkward conversation with an actual agent.
Joy Macknight, deputy editor of The Banker, one of this year’s judges for the FICO Decisions Awards, said, “Globe Telecom’s winning entry exhibited an innovative application of new technology, including machine learning and sophisticated analytics, to drive impressive results in collections performance, customer satisfaction and cost reduction.”
“It is remarkable to see how much business impact analytics-driven, multi-channel collections has brought Globe,” said Dattu Kompella, managing director in Asia for FICO. “Not only have they reduced the cost of collections, they have also future-proofed their business to accommodate future capacity. They have proven that collections need not be a cumbersome or unpleasant experience for customers.”
FICO® Customer Communication Services helps organizations collect debt, reduce fraud, and help improve customer service by delivering intelligent two-way communications with customers through relevant channels – from automated voice, text, e-mail and mobile app notifications.
For more product information, visit https://www.fico.com/en/products/fico-customer-communication-services.