WEST JORDAN, Utah — The collections team at Mountain America CU here is using Facebook and MySpace to find members who aren't paying their credit union loans.
"It's amazing how much information members will give out over social networking sites, making it easier for our collectors to find them and repossess their cars," explained Ray Carsey, VP, technical services at the $2.8-billion CU. "We put our collectors on a separate computer network so they can browse sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The collectors find pictures of the cars and the members' phone numbers, and then they contact the members."
In fact, the media helps MACU "find any clue in helping locate our delinquent members," added Woody Woodruff, AVP-collections. As MACU is new to the social-network approach to collections, Carsey said he is not able to provide measured results.
MACU is not the first financial services company to use social media to aid in collections. Indeed, some collectors at other institutions are using more extreme techniques, in which they use phony pictures to pose online as potential "friends," only to reveal later to debtors that they are professional skip-tracers.
Beyond using social networks to help reduce delinquencies, the collections team is tapping into the CU's existing call recording technology. Collections agents play back digital recordings of collections calls to resolve complaints and disputes with members, Carsey said. "There have been a few situations where the agent said something, but the member said the agent didn't," he said. "So we've played back the calls to confirm the agent was right. If we didn't have the recordings, it would have cost us a fair amount of money."
MACU uses Compliance Recording, offered by Minneapolis, Minn.-based Calabrio, Inc., to record calls across the organization. Employees can search through archived recordings based on agent, date, time, phone numbers and custom fields.
Calabrio is connected to MACU's Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone system, which the CU uses to place internal and external calls and for telecommuting. VoIP is provided by Cisco Unified Communications Manager. Collections calls are automatically routed to appropriate agents via the Cisco Unified Contact Center Express solution, a customer interaction management platform. The solution also helps manage outbound collections calls.
The Calabrio and Cisco technologies were recommended and implemented by Mountain States Networking, a network integrator in Salt Lake City.
The automated Cisco call routing helps push collections calls - among other calls - to the central call center and away from local branches, which were getting "pounded" with calls, Carsey said. In fact, the call center is answering up to 40% of the calls that branches used to handle, he said.
To track and report accounts under collections, MACU uses two platforms: the collection management tool that is part of the Episys core platform from San Diego-based Symitar; and Framework from Malvern, Penn.-based Akcelerant, according to Woodruff. Each tool meets the unique servicing needs of different loan types, he said.
Both platforms interface well with other programs, save agents' time and deliver helpful reporting and tracking features, said Woodruff. MACU can create custom reports from the systems. The CU also tailored its Symitar collections screen to display all accounts associated with the member in question for a "360-degree view."
The MACU collections department is "really busy," Carsey said. The team, currently made up of 32 people, is "growing."
