Understanding, grip and communication
About fourteen million times a year, a bailiff office contacts debtor customers about (usually) paying debts. Sometimes it is a visit from a bailiff (about three and a half million times a year), sometimes a text message or app, but usually a letter. The purpose of this communication is usually to resolve payment arrears.
You send a letter in an envelope and that's it, it seems…. Unfortunately, many of the letters we send do not respond. A missed opportunity, costs and frustrations for everyone. Why is there no response and can we do better? The SyncassoLab has investigated this, together with Dr Martijn Keizer of the University of Groningen (RUG).
Example: you have had a hard working day and you come home, ha nice post, oooh no fun from Syncasso Bailiffs and Debt Collection… After a hard day, the battery of some people is empty and they have no energy for a difficult message. Then it is easy to put the envelope away for later. We encounter those discarded envelopes again during evacuations…. close. So missed opportunity to solve it.
It starts with understanding why someone doesn't open the envelope. After a hard day, your cognitive abilities (taking note and processing) are low. An envelope from Syncasso Bailiffs and Debt Collection will often contain a reminder that can no longer be processed. So put it away and if we are unlucky also forgotten.
Then we miss an opportunity for communication and a solution. We looked for solutions together with the RUG. From this, an envelope with animations emerged as the only workable solution, after a process of several months. Envelopes with animations have been investigated before, but never in combination with debts. We know from previous studies that having debts is a complicating factor, the taboo hinders communication.
When developing the envelope, we chose five animations in collaboration with the animator. On the front is a reference to the four pictures on the back. These pictures depict: opening, reading, calling and solving. The pictures thus remove the threat from the envelope and show that there is a solution.
In more than 8000 unique cases, we tested the animation envelopes against the regular envelopes. In different phases: the first letter, the second letter and sometimes we used a third letter in a file. Only responses within fourteen days have been measured. By reactions we mean letters, telephone calls, visits and of course payments.
Reactions from debtor customers who cannot pay are a very pleasant by-catch for us. After checking that a claim is indeed unrecoverable, we can close the file and save costs and stress for both the debtor customer and our client.
It was clear that there was an increase in responses of about 10%, to both payments and contacts with the first letter. The effect in the second and third letter was negative. The final conclusion is therefore that the animation envelope provides a clear increase in responses and payments, but only with the first letter.
The envelope is just one example of our vision of debt collection and bailiff work. The starting point is that more knowledge about debtor customers contributes to a better result and ultimately makes the work more pleasant for everyone. An approach that does not concern the heads of debtor customers, but rather changes something in those heads. For example, we improve the collection scores of our clients with objectively substantiated methods and smart innovations that we develop in our SyncassoLab.