Contact centre and collections transformation for a Dominican commercial bank

The challenge

Call abandonment stood at 23.4%, pushing customers into branches and making the branch network the bank's most expensive service channel. Collections recovered only 42% in the 1-30 day bucket against a ~60% market benchmark, using manual dialling and spreadsheets. Regulatory reporting consumed around 900 person-hours monthly. Building in-house would have breached the bank's cost-to-income ratio.

Approach and methodology

• Sized capacity against interval-level volume and stood up a workforce-management function
• Segmented collections by balance, delinquency age, product and contact history
• Moved collections from manual dialling to a designed multichannel contact strategy
• Automated the compilation and reconciliation steps of the supervisory reporting cycle

Results

Call abandonment fell from 23.4% to 3.8% by month 12, service-only branch visits dropped 22%, and 1-30 day collections recovery rose from 42% to 61%, reaching the market benchmark. Regulatory reporting effort fell from about 900 to 210 person-hours monthly, with the released capacity redeployed to analysis. Governance from the Toronto parent and a documented Ley 172-13 position satisfied a risk committee that had blocked two prior proposals.

Enduring value

Collections segmentation and the multichannel contact strategy gave the bank a usable collections data asset for the first time, and the automated reporting process is now a permanent part of the supervisory cycle.