For accounts receivables firms and collection agencies, it's crucial to understand how agents spend their day. This knowledge is central to long-term success and profitability. 

Debt collection agents interact with debtors many times before collecting payments. Therefore, agents must take notes following each call with debtors. These notes ensure agents making follow-up calls have access to previous interactions with the debtor.

Despite their importance, the note-taking process is a clear drain on productivity. It reduces an agent's up-time and time on calls to debtors, which impacts profitability. Agents have several tasks to complete in after-call wrap-up, besides taking notes. For example, they need to disposition calls, post payments, and set follow-up reminders. Depending on the nature of the call, they may also need to chat with their supervisors.

For an average agent, taking notes and wrapping up a call takes almost as much time as the call itself. On average, it uses up between 20% and 25% of an agent's day — nearly two hours.

Although this is a considerable portion of the agent's day, it often goes undetected. Taking place across several small windows, note-taking takes approximately 60 seconds. In other words, it's an invisible parasite, delivering death by a million cuts.

Time is one thing, but what does this note-taking cost in financial terms? Conservative estimates predict it costs businesses $10,000 per agent each year!

The costs associated with this downtime are apparent. However, it's likely this is only part of the story. The time lost is easy to quantify, with agents spending 20-25% of their time in wrap-up. But our research shows after-call wrap-up also mentally distracts agents. This distraction and constant context-switching substantially affects their productivity throughout the day. Given these findings, it's likely the impact on productivity is far more significant.

ProNotes, developed by Prodigal, is a game-changer for the credit and collections industry. This application is a first-of-its-kind AI solution. It works by automating the after-call wrap-up to unlock up to 25% of an agent's time.

During wrap-up, agents complete tasks such as writing up call notes and dispositioning. Speech AI can automate these tasks and enhance agent productivity in following ways:

1. Reduce distraction, enabling agents to give borrowers 100% of their attention.
2. Eliminate inaccuracies and human subjectivity from manual call notes.
3. Decrease QA review time by standardizing note-taking and dispositioning workflows.

Do you want to drive productivity and profitability for your collection agency? Modern machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) methods can help you achieve this.

Clients already using ProNotes describe a massive spike in productivity, with significant cost savings. For example, a collection agency with 120 agents saves $1.5 million each year. How? By automating after-call wrap-up—all thanks to ProNotes!

For more information, download the full ProNotes whitepaper here.