What were your top considerations when choosing to migrate your collections system?
JP: In order to perfect customer experience, you need to be able to fine-tune and make the whole experience work in harmony. That might be chat, web journey or over the phone, and in my experience, you need a configurable system you can fine-tune to exacting standards.
Tallyman offered us that but it didn’t go into online journeys very well, it couldn’t integrate into chat and so on. Flexys offers those opportunities for us. Fine-tuning process flows was critical, and being able to configure that ourselves so we can be nimble and agile with our iterations.
We’re keen to make sure we have API interfaces. We had stretched Tallyman well beyond its capabilities. Our version didn’t offer these features and one requirement for the alternative provider was that integrating into third-party systems or web services were going to be state of the art.
Were there any particular risks you were trying to mitigate by moving from a legacy platform?
There are two parts to this, the first is pure risk. We are on an aged system and parts of the underlying technology are reaching end of life. That was a cliff edge that was coming. We’d known for some time that this was coming. If I’m honest, we’d been kicking this can down the road for quite a while. We needed to move for security reasons.
The other factor is that we have an entire hardware infrastructure currently on-premises. We’d like to be able to reduce our dependency on that in the long run. Off-premises technology is part of our long-term strategy.
If you were speaking to another finance organisation that is at the start of that journey, what advice would you give them?
I think it depends on their individual circumstances. A project like this is big, akin to Hannibal climbing over the Alps with the elephants! It’s a massive risk and a career-defining moment to make a choice like this, to say we’re going to swap out a core system.
Ultimately, you’ve got to do two things: you’ve got to be really clear about the long term benefits. There’s no doubt a project like this is going to cause a lot of pain in the short term to get it over the line successfully. It’s loads of effort in terms of time, effort and energy. But like Hannibal, it’s a super strategic move and long term, it can offer enormous value. You need a very strong, committed team who share the long term ideals and you’ve got to keep them centre stage because it’s quite a mountain to climb.
We’ve been on Tallyman for 17 years and stripped as much value out of it as we possibly can but most of that has been internal. We’ve done some web development for self-service but we’ve held back on a lot of that until we replaced the collections system. I predict we’ll be able to double our portfolio once the new system is in place, and not double the staff. There’s enormous value in those sorts of achievements. But they take time to come to fruition and everyone involved needs to understand the long term aims.
How do you get to that point?
It’s getting the right stakeholders. Based on my exposure to the technology out there (and I’ve seen most of the systems out there) would you rather have three times as many staff in ten years or the same number of staff with a system that does half the heavy lifting for them?
People come with costs, training issues, recruitment costs etc. I would rather have a smaller core team that are really well trained and exceptionally well paid (because you can afford to) and have the technology do the heavy lifting.
Getting another five collectors and a manager might be the simple thing to do in the short term but in the long term, it gets harder and more expensive.
And the people who are going to be carrying those burdens, what do they want? You need the commitment and belief that technology of this kind can have those sorts of benefits.
What is the vision, post-pandemic? How are customers coping?
From a collections point of view, remarkably well. I’m surprised at how well things have gone. We had a robust DR strategy in play. That meant we didn’t have any downtime really. We set everyone up for working from home within a week and that’s where they’ve been ever since. So, from an operational point of view, we didn’t really have any problems.
From the customer side, we had a lot of really uncertain people in the early days. Uncertainty was the biggest fear that was circulating so the issue was dealing with that demand and, because we didn’t have complete web services, we took all of it on the chin, on the phones, which were frantic for a couple of weeks. We offered what we would normally do which is lots of flexibility under the circumstances. The FCA brought in rules which were roughly in line with our thinking anyway and we implemented those.
We had a wave of bad debt as a result of the deferments but a significant proportion of those made that up as they went back to work. Our arrears are pretty much back to pre-pandemic. The biggest concern for our customers now is inflation.
Our philosophy is to keep in touch with customers that are being hit by Covid on a regular basis and we’ve kept that conversation going throughout. People who have suffered or continue to suffer due to lockdown, we are in a high level of contact with, supporting them as best we can through this.
What were your top considerations when choosing to migrate your collections system?
JP: In order to perfect customer experience, you need to be able to fine-tune and make the whole experience work in harmony. That might be chat, web journey or over the phone, and in my experience, you need a configurable system you can fine-tune to exacting standards.
Tallyman offered us that but it didn’t go into online journeys very well, it couldn’t integrate into chat and so on. Flexys offers those opportunities for us. Fine-tuning process flows was critical, and being able to configure that ourselves so we can be nimble and agile with our iterations.
We’re keen to make sure we have API interfaces. We had stretched Tallyman well beyond its capabilities. Our version didn’t offer these features and one requirement for the alternative provider was that integrating into third-party systems or web services were going to be state of the art.
Were there any particular risks you were trying to mitigate by moving from a legacy platform?
There are two parts to this, the first is pure risk. We are on an aged system and parts of the underlying technology are reaching end of life. That was a cliff edge that was coming. We’d known for some time that this was coming. If I’m honest, we’d been kicking this can down the road for quite a while. We needed to move for security reasons.
The other factor is that we have an entire hardware infrastructure currently on-premises. We’d like to be able to reduce our dependency on that in the long run. Off-premises technology is part of our long-term strategy.
If you were speaking to another finance organisation that is at the start of that journey, what advice would you give them?
I think it depends on their individual circumstances. A project like this is big, akin to Hannibal climbing over the Alps with the elephants! It’s a massive risk and a career-defining moment to make a choice like this, to say we’re going to swap out a core system.
Ultimately, you’ve got to do two things: you’ve got to be really clear about the long term benefits. There’s no doubt a project like this is going to cause a lot of pain in the short term to get it over the line successfully. It’s loads of effort in terms of time, effort and energy. But like Hannibal, it’s a super strategic move and long term, it can offer enormous value. You need a very strong, committed team who share the long term ideals and you’ve got to keep them centre stage because it’s quite a mountain to climb.
We’ve been on Tallyman for 17 years and stripped as much value out of it as we possibly can but most of that has been internal. We’ve done some web development for self-service but we’ve held back on a lot of that until we replaced the collections system. I predict we’ll be able to double our portfolio once the new system is in place, and not double the staff. There’s enormous value in those sorts of achievements. But they take time to come to fruition and everyone involved needs to understand the long term aims.
How do you get to that point?
It’s getting the right stakeholders. Based on my exposure to the technology out there (and I’ve seen most of the systems out there) would you rather have three times as many staff in ten years or the same number of staff with a system that does half the heavy lifting for them?
People come with costs, training issues, recruitment costs etc. I would rather have a smaller core team that are really well trained and exceptionally well paid (because you can afford to) and have the technology do the heavy lifting.
Getting another five collectors and a manager might be the simple thing to do in the short term but in the long term, it gets harder and more expensive.
And the people who are going to be carrying those burdens, what do they want? You need the commitment and belief that technology of this kind can have those sorts of benefits.
What is the vision, post-pandemic? How are customers coping?
From a collections point of view, remarkably well. I’m surprised at how well things have gone. We had a robust DR strategy in play. That meant we didn’t have any downtime really. We set everyone up for working from home within a week and that’s where they’ve been ever since. So, from an operational point of view, we didn’t really have any problems.
From the customer side, we had a lot of really uncertain people in the early days. Uncertainty was the biggest fear that was circulating so the issue was dealing with that demand and, because we didn’t have complete web services, we took all of it on the chin, on the phones, which were frantic for a couple of weeks. We offered what we would normally do which is lots of flexibility under the circumstances. The FCA brought in rules which were roughly in line with our thinking anyway and we implemented those.
We had a wave of bad debt as a result of the deferments but a significant proportion of those made that up as they went back to work. Our arrears are pretty much back to pre-pandemic. The biggest concern for our customers now is inflation.
Our philosophy is to keep in touch with customers that are being hit by Covid on a regular basis and we’ve kept that conversation going throughout. People who have suffered or continue to suffer due to lockdown, we are in a high level of contact with, supporting them as best we can through this.