Accelerating debt collection success with effective voicemail detection

Read how financial services firm DelfinGroup used VCC Live’s voicemail detection feature to diminish voicemail encounters during collection campaigns.

DelfinGroup is a Latvian financial services company specialized in providing simple and accessible consumer loans. The firm provides its consumer services under two brands: Banknote and VIZIA.

As with many companies offering consumer finance, one of DelfinGroup’s biggest challenges is debt collection; specifically the significant amount of time agents spend handling customer voicemails during outbound calls.

Burdened by voicemails

Connection rates during debt collection campaigns were low and it became apparent to supervisors that agents felt both overloaded and dejected because of this.

DelfinGroup sought new contact center software that could support their outbound calls, but also had specialist features for diminishing voicemail encounters. The company approached VCC Live and its voicemail detection feature as a potential solution to their issues.

Commonly known in the industry as answering machine detection (AMD), VCC Live’s voicemail detection enables users to automatically identify and skip voicemail-bound calls. This helps to boost outbound talk time and improve agent satisfaction by handling more live calls. What’s more, when a call encounters a voicemail, the handling is entirely automated and users can select custom dispositions – e.g. leaving a prerecorded message and/or personalized SMS.  

Following a detailed discussion and demo of VCC Live’s cloud contact center software, DeflinGroup opted to proceed with the implementation of a new outbound call solution powered by voicemail detection.

Training the feature

The implementation period of our platform lasted a few weeks and, during this time, VCC Live worked with DelfinGroup to conduct testing of the voicemail detection feature. 

This experimental process involved using the function in test mode: allowing the feature to train on unique voicemail indicators (e.g. country or telecom-specific signals). Voicemail detection also uses audio analysis to detect around 20 different sounds or patterns – such as silence, beeps, and background noise.

Through testing the function on several hundred of DelfinGroup’s live outbound calls, the voicemail detection rate grew to 94% and the feature was ready for full deployment across all of DelfinGroup’s outbound calls.

Making huge time savings

Through VCC Live, DelfinGroup handles around a quarter of a million calls per month across its agent base.

Using our voice solution, each agent is able to handle over 100 calls per day thereby keeping the company’s key metric of “productive talk time” as high as possible.

In the first full month of using voicemail detection, the feature successfully identified 5,094 voicemails. On average, it would normally take an agent 30 seconds to handle a voicemail before moving on to the next call. Therefore, this feature alone now eliminates over 42 hours of wasted call time per month.

With DelfinGroup’s aim of introducing more automation to its collection activities, we’re now discussing the use of features such as outbound IVR and over-the-phone payments to further enhance the solution.