When a customer is unable to make payments on credit cards, mortgages and other products, the customer account is moved into collections. The associated services that help to notify the customer and help the customer to move away from collections are termed as Collections services.

Contact strategy

A contact strategy is the combination of steps and treatments that are used to contact a customer in collections. The application contains 18 sample contact strategies that have been implemented by using offer flow rules.

The Pega Collections application is installed with the preconfigured collection contact strategy rule DetermineContactTreatment that is designed to determine which offer flow rule to call in a collection case against a customer. This strategy evaluates the customer risk and the contact strategy.

Customizing a contact strategy

When a new collections case is assigned to a strategy, the contact strategy remains open until a Payment Plan is created and offer flow begins running. A strategy ID is created for every collection account to determine the appropriate contact strategy. This ID is used to drive the case through a contact strategy, for example, letters and calls.

Creating an offer flow

The Offer Flow contains the exact sequence of actions to be performed in the life cycle of a particular offer. The Offer Flow consists of a variety of shapes and connectors that connect these shapes. Users can configure the details of each step directly on the step’s shape by using the shape’s Properties panel.

The Offer Flow attempts to make contact with the customer by using available channels such as SMS, email, or phone contact. The objective of contact is to prompt the customer to bring their account back within the terms of the credit agreement, either by paying any arrears on the account or by making sufficient payment to bring the account balance within its credit limit.

High risk customers are often prioritized and special treatments that quickly respond to delinquency with phone calls and correspondence are required within the first days of an account entering collections. There is no time limit for the payment, but if payment is not initiated on the promised date, then promise is determined to be broken. Financial services clients can define a broken promise strategy with follow up letters, email, and phone calls, or can choose to route the case back to the previous treatment strategy.

If payments are less than the amount of the payment case, the payment case remains open. If it is equal to the amount of the payment case, the case is resolved.

Outbound interaction

High risk customers are prioritized through outbound interaction in the form of follow up letters and phone calls in order to resolve payment. Pega Customer Decision Hub™ for Financial Services sends these outbound call requests though the CreateOutboundInteraction SOAP service to the Collections application to initiate the interaction.

The requests are further sent to a specific workbasket that is determined by the SelectDialer decision table.

• Contact strategy is initiated by calling the DetermineContactTreatment strategy, which segments the customers by using the DetermineCustomerValue decision table.

• The results (High, Medium or Low) of the EvaluatesContactRisk scorecard is appended and determines the offer flow to execute. The scorecard rule EvaluatesContactRisk calculates a risk score for the customer based on their credit score, the number of times that the customer has been in collections, and the number of times that the customer went over their limit in the last 12 months.

Each segment divides further into High Risk, Medium Risk or Low Risk, as displayed in the following image.

VIP

Default treatments might not be applicable for VIP customers. For example, a customer who makes $10 million USD per year forgets to pay his credit card bill and owes $4,000 USD. Here, your default treatment is to get the $4,000 USD back. You can opt to waive any fee for this individual and send a reminder. As a result, some personalized VIP-specific treatments are required to handle VIP customers.

First Installment Default

First Installment Default (FID) segments customers who have missed their first payment on a credit contract. These missed payments can be due to service issues through no fault of the customers' own, such as bad data on an automated payment. If the reason code indicates insufficient funds or a closed account, this can indicate a high risk and require action, such as a suspension of the credit function, and can initiate high risk customer contact strategies.

Repeat offender

If a customer has multiple instances of arrears within a specified time frame, they can be categorized as a repeat offender. In this case, the organization might want to implement a specific strategy to manage these customers.

Arrears

An account is deemed to be in arrears when the debt is overdue and unpaid. Additional segmentation logic is created to group cases of similar risk. In collections, risk is primarily a measure of the probability that the case will eventually be written off as bad debt.

Financial services clients have their own requirements for determining risk. Note that the client can also import scores from external sources and consume within the business logic.

Over limit

Over limit customers can be initially segmented as customers who are not paying enough to support their balance. Treatment strategies for over limit customers are similar to arrears strategies, with attempts to contact the customer by phone, email, letters, and text message, with the objective of making customer contact and negotiating a payment to bring the balance back within the terms of their agreement.

The following table displays the list of offer flows and the corresponding offer group: