This topic covers how a customer service representative, or agent, interacts with the customer to resolve a collections case and how you can customize interactions for your organization.

Before a collections case gets to the customer interaction stage, it has been analyzed through the Contact Strategy and the Determine Offer Treatment stages. This topic focuses on the resulting offers presented in a customer interaction, the last two components in the Collections Management process.

Using the suggested offers in a customer interaction

After a collections case is assigned to an Outbound Call workbasket, a customer service representative (CSR) contacts the customer and attempts to resolve the case using one of the suggested offers shown in the Interaction Portal. In a typical customer interaction, the CSR determines a payment plan (payments and amount) with the customer.

The Interaction Portal shows one or more suggested payment plans, depending on the result of the Determine Offer Treatment (DetermineNegotiateOffers) process.

If the CSR and customer agree on one of the suggested payment plans, an update is recorded in the payments file and a payment case is created.

Building a custom offer

When the customer does not agree on one of the suggested plans, or if offers have not been configured, an experienced CSR can create a custom payment plan. The CSR defines a unique payment plan using calculators that assist in determining the correct payments for a time-based or value-based plan.

In the Schedule Payment Plan section, in the Payment plan field, select Custom to define a new plan for the selected customer, as shown in the following figure:

Changing the suggested offers process

A system architect can change or add offers generated by the offer strategy.

Offers are created and configured in Pega Customer Decision Hub™ for Financial Services. The sample data provides a default strategy and offer process that uses the decisioning and analytics capability of the application to suggest the payment plans. The default strategy provides offers for the full Payment Now or End of Month, or splits the amount due over multiple payments (for example, make two weekly payments, make four weekly payments).

An organization can use the sample data as a reference to create offers and the strategy for their particular requirements.

Adding a new payment plan or modifying an existing plan

The ProcessNegotiateOfferRequest interaction rule calls the DetermineNegotiateOffers strategy, which evaluates offers based on the propositions defined in Pega Customer Decision Hub for Financial Services under the Decision Data rule PaymentPlans. You can:

• Add new payment plans by adding new propositions to this decision data rule.
• Modify the properties of an existing payment plan.

Pega Customer Decision Hub for Financial Services also uses the following rules to refine the offer details.

• The decision table PaymentDaysToStart and data transform GetDaysToStart are used to calculate the start date of the treatment.
• The scorecard WaiveFeeScorecard is used to calculate a weighted score based on a variety of factors such as number of payments and the number of days before the payment plan starts and ends to determine if associated fees should be waived. While this scorecard is available it is currently not leveraged in the plans offered or in the UI.

For more information, see Pega Collections contact strategy.

Pega Collections Strategy Builder

The Pega Collections Strategy Builder is a guided process for creating collections strategies.

To access the Strategy Builder, launch the Pega Customer Decision Hub portal (by logging in as an operator with access to the CRMFS:MarketAdmins group), and then select Intelligence > Strategies > Create > Guide me through it. If you have the sample data installed, you will see the sample strategies.

For the Collections Treatment, there is a sample strategy that determines which offers to present to different customer segments.

For creating a Payment Plan strategy, you can use the Create > Start with new canvas option. This is a blank canvas to which you can add shapes to create a workflow. You can use the Determine Negotiate Offers strategy from the sample data as a reference. This strategy evaluates offers based on the propositions (Payment Plans) defined in Pega Customer Decision Hub for Financial Services.

For more information, see Pega Collections contact strategy.

Change the user experience or case flow of the payments process

Use the Negotiate Offers case type to make changes to the user experience or case flow of the payments process.

Payment Monitoring

Payment Monitoring monitors transactions to make sure the Payment plan is met. If a payment is missed, Pega Collections invokes the Broken Promise Contact Strategy.

• Payments are made through the file feed and initiate the ManagePayments activity.
• Payments are applied to the payment cases starting with the payment with the nearest payment date.
• If payments are less than the amount of the payment case, the payment case remains open.
• If payments are equal to the amount of the payment case, the case is resolved.
• If payments are above the amount of the payment case, additional portions or entire payment cases can be resolved based on the amount of the payment.
• If a payment is missed, Pega Collections invokes the Broken Promise Contact Strategy.