Right Party Contacted (RPC)
These measures show how many of your reminders calls to customers land with the right person and how many end up stuck in a loop on a switchboard or meet ‘wrong number’ or ‘dead line’ tones. When a high number of your calls do not land, it is not only frustrating and demotivating, but it’s a huge waste of time. Most importantly, it points to an issue with your contact database – but not always.
Promise To Pay (PTP/P2P)
This measure is simply the number of all collections calls made that result in a promise to pay. It is calculated on all outbound calls, not just the ones that do ‘land’. When this rate is low, it could indicate a need for further training amongst your Collections teams. If your calls are landing, but few of them result in a promise to pay (high TPC but low PTP), then there’s definitely more to be done around training, scripting and process.
Figures down during lockdown
Not surprisingly, any measures that may have been taken before the first lockdowns internationally fell sharply once debtors were no longer available on office phones, and worse, when there was a wholescale reluctance to pass on mobile numbers or where Voice Over IP rerouting was not in place to divert calls to landlines to staff’s laptops or mobiles.
One of our clients first encountered this when customers in Italy and Spain went into Lockdown, way ahead of the UK and US in 2020. Luckily, at that point, they were on their way to implementing Corrivo.
Set up for success
Corrivo is our cloud-based e-Invoicing platform that has three really core functional modules – eBilling, Collections and Disputes. With any one of these, our clients send us a Billing Contact Feed File, separate from their order data that we convert into invoices. This includes all the contact details for those people to whom e-Invoices or collections and disputes questions should be addressed. A primary and secondary contact are usually set up for each purpose, even if, in small companies, there is only one person to contact for all matters.
Some of our larger clients send us a comprehensive list of contacts per customer account, with only a handful of them being marked as the primary contacts. In the case of Invoice Disputes, this can help, as the person who disputes the invoice can be a buyer rather than an Accounts Payable contact. In addition to all those customer accounts, contacts pulled across at set up and refreshed overnight or more often, anyone using Corrivo can add new non-primary invoice contacts or make notes when updating existing ones.
Even though our client was only using eBilling, once live on Corrivo, they noticed their RPC and PTP rates going up. The people using Corrivo eBilling kept notes on the people they contacted. Even though in ‘normal’ times, they were usually tasked with making Collections reminders calls, they put all hands to the pump to cover for staff absences.
Having up to date records, additional notes on recently acquired numbers, and a wider set of numbers than those required for the primary purpose of sending electronic invoices, the users had everything they needed in one place, where they were able to benefit from updates made by colleagues in their teams.
How an eBilling client improved Collections without using Collections
With little hope of their Right Party Contacted rate going up or returning to pre-lockdown levels, this customer improved Collections measures simply because of the elegance of the Corrivo system. The interface is easy to use and acts like a console for a working day. Flicking back to emails meant that the Corrivo users could share the latest contact details with their non-Corrivo using colleagues.
How to improve RPC and PTP rates WITH Corrivo Collections, without trying
The ease within which Corrivo tracks and measures everything corporate users and their customer’ users do is the number one area commented on by new users. Our clients immediately see the value of the additional data points gathered using Corrivo. As Corrivo lets you keep records of all calls made and emails sent within the specific chase path or collections process followed, it makes it easy to calculate RPC and PTP rates.
The underlying set-up of your Corrivo implementation, its connection to your master customer database and the way your Corrivo users keep records up to date in Corrivo does the rest, with one exception. What is that? Net calls made.
Invoice Accuracy rises when invoices are created automatically within Corrivo. This results in fewer issues or queries, resulting in a net drop in the number of collections problems and disputes.
Days Sales Outstanding drops, the company’s Collection Effectiveness Index rises and all other measures seem to improve, purely by addressing the transcription issues and improving the speed and certainty of invoice delivery across all methods.
Now, doesn’t that sound like something your Credit Team could benefit from?
Click here to download the infographic
If so, contact me by phone or email, or find me on Linked In. davidh@datainterconnect.co.uk.
