As any consumer finance leader knows, the human element can make or break your team's success. And despite the best training and policies, agent missteps in key areas can directly undermine your operational efficiency and compliance.

The breakdown of agent errors

Agent errors generally fall into one of three buckets:

Create significant risk

Maybe there was a DNC, C&D, bankruptcy, or wrong number that was missed or mis-coded, intentionally or not.

An error such as contacting an account that requested a DNC can create significant risk for litigation risk and reputational damage.

Suppress significant opportunity

On the flip side, if a contact was incorrectly coded as DNC, C&D, bankruptcy, wrong number, etc., the customer would not have been contacted again, leading to missed payment opportunities.

And it's not just individual customers who are affected - inaccurate data means your ability to analyze and evaluate your portfolio and agents as a whole is compromised, leaving opportunities to improve on the table.

Simple errors without major impact

This is the good news - not every error is a crisis. But even those simple errors need addressing and resolving in order to be able to effectively improve agent performance and uncover accurate customer data.

Areas where agent errors can affect your business

‍1. Suboptimal negotiation and resolution amounts

Maximizing collections is the core function of any debt recovery team. Yet even experienced agents can struggle to consistently negotiate the ideal resolution amount from consumers.

Some may be too aggressive, scaring off customers and reducing overall recovery. Others may be too lenient, settling for less than the account is worth. There's a delicate balance, and it takes keen judgment to strike it.

The consequences go beyond just that one account. Inconsistent resolution amounts make it impossible to forecast collections accurately or optimize your strategy. It also skews your data, making it harder to identify high-performing agents or uncover systemic issues.

2. Incomplete or inaccurate call notations

After a call wraps up, proper documentation is essential. Agents need to capture key details about the interaction, any commitments made, and the next planned steps.

But in the heat of the moment, critical information can easily slip through the cracks. Maybe the agent forgets to note the agreed payment date. Or they misrecord the consumer's financial hardship explanation.

Without a complete, accurate call record, your team loses visibility. You can't ensure promised actions are followed through, make informed decisions on the account, research across accounts to build strategy, or maintain a defensible audit trail.

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3. Incorrect disposition or outcome coding

Proper disposition coding is the lynchpin of collections compliance. Agents must accurately categorize the outcome of each call - whether it's a payment made, a promise to pay, a refusal to pay, or something else entirely.

However, harried agents under productivity pressures may take shortcuts, rushing through or misinterpreting the right code to use. This can produce a jumbled, unreliable dataset.

The implications are severe. Incorrect coding masks true compliance risks, leaves you vulnerable to regulatory scrutiny, and prevents you from using data to optimize your operations.

What to do next

These problems have been around for a long time, and the solutions have been ineffective - plagued by faulty speech recognition software that required a dedicated analyst and still produced up to ~50% false positives and negatives or manual approaches that increased both agent and manager workload and still left opportunity on the table.

But AI is opening up new opportunities.