success stories

Objective

To help Red Castle improve the speed and efficiency of their debt collection process by using SMS on the PureResponse system.

Background

Red Castle Recoveries was started two and a half years ago.

The operations primary functions are as a third party debt collection and trace function as well as a full outsource solution for all types of businesses - large and small. Having grown out of the largest independent motor finance provider - Automotive Financial Services - the collections operation has a proven track-record in trace and recoveries as well as incorporating an in-house legal practice.

Today Red Castle is one of the most forward-thinking and progressive UK debt collection agencies, and being part of the Nostrum Group of companies it has specialist providers in marketing, sales and IT and can therefore respond to any client request. As a result it has an impressive and growing portfolio of blue chip clients across a number of different sectors.

Throughout it's history Red Castle has always believed that investment in technology enables them to greatly increase collection rates whilst driving down costs, which can be passed onto its clients. A point well made by Operations Manager, Mike Oxley:

"I don't think there is any doubt that our investment in an ultra-modern call centre and the latest software systems provides a better service for our customers and helps us win more business".

It was part of this constant drive to use the latest technology that persuaded Mike to investigate how the Pure SMS delivery service might improve their service even further.

Challenges

On the face of it, using SMS is a very direct way of contacting people and one most would find impossible to ignore. After all, these days almost everyone has a mobile phone and wherever people and whatever they might be doing, a text message should get to them fast.

Mike decided to view a demonstration of the Pure software.

"The key for us, was to find an SMS delivery system that was simple to implement and use, would fit smoothly into our existing processes and was scaleable enough to handle small and large scale message campaigns. Of course, the cost of the system was also a very large factor, but then I suppose it always is really!"

From the short 30 minute demonstration, Mike found that the Pure software met almost all of his criteria already, but was particularly impressed with they way Pure were flexible enough to add specific features into the system to suit his individual requirements.

He wanted a method of inserting a unique code into each text message, which the recipient could quote when responding and therefore be easily referenced by the call centre consultant. When Pure came up with a proposal for including this feature, Mike decided to conduct an initial test of the software

"We decided to send SMS messages to a number of people who were at various stages of our normal debt collecting process and monitor the results."

"To be honest, I think I always expected to get good results from sending SMS messages, but some of the results from the test were particularly impressive. For one category of people we found that 38% of them called us in response to the message, which is almost certainly a far higher response rate than would be achieved by sending a normal letter by post"

Getting more people to call in, instead of having to constantly chase them, obviously saves time and money for the Red Castle call centre team and the Pure software is now used for almost every recovery campaign undertaken.

Conclusions

• With Pure, Red Castle manged to get response rates up to 38%.
• Pure managed to adapt to Red Castle's needs by providing a method for them to insert reference numbers in SMS.
• Red Castle saved time and money by using PureResponse in situations that previously would have required a call-centre representative to individually phone debtors.