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Many of the nation's largest credit grantors are missing a chance to develop new account relationships through their deceased account recovery practices, according to a recent study released today by Forte LLC.
Based on a survey of eight of the nation's 15 largest credit grantors, Forte's executive brief "From CRM to DCRM: A Multi-Generational Approach to Customer Relationships" highlights the methods companies are using to manage deceased accounts and identifies opportunities to transform deceased account recovery processes to develop new customer relationships and improve results. Forte officials refer to the company as the innovator of DCRM, which stands for deceased customer relationship management.
The company's study showed that current deceased account recovery practices include mostly reactive approaches to identifying deceased customers, limited coordination between recovery and other departments, very few special services designed to support the survivor and the perception of a trade-off between brand protection and recoveries.
The Forte brief examines these practices and explores ways in which creditors can use DCRM to enhance their brand with survivors while optimizing their deceased debt recovery results. The paper recommends a series of deceased debt recovery best practices, such as using enhanced date-of-death technology to proactively identify deceased customers and offering online resources to support survivors after a loved one's death, to help strengthen a creditor's brand and enhance results.
"DCRM is an integrated set of customer-contact procedures, internal operations and focused technologies that help organizations track, organize and manage relationships with the survivors of deceased customers," says Steve Farsht, Forte's CEO. "By approaching deceased account recovery through DCRM, creditors have an unprecedented opportunity to differentiate their companies and transform the recovery process from a narrow focus on debt collection into a powerful channel that can secure new customers for years to come.
"Most companies have sophisticated strategies in place to build their brands and cultivate relationships around their customers' major life events, such as the birth of a child, the purchase of a home or retirement. But a customer's death is not typically considered in this context," says Farsht. "While organizations generally view a customer's death as the end of a customer relationship, this paper identifies numerous ways in which credit grantors can change this dynamic. Our concept of DCRM challenges credit grantors to view the deceased debt recovery process as an opportunity to create goodwill and forge new customer relationships with survivors."
The survey concluded in April 2009 and included opinions from executives at eight of the nation's 15 largest credit grantors that collectively issue more than 50% of the nation's outstanding credit card debt and have more than 150 million active accounts.
