Debtors get the SMS

Randburg-based legal firm, Munnik Basson DaGama (MBD) Incorporated, has cut certain debt-collecting costs by more than 60% by utilising an automated short message service (SMS).

"The beauty of the system is that automated communication is much more efficient and effective with client debtors," says Frans Basson, Managing Director of MBD.

Using the CellSys messaging platform allows MBD to deliver individual, personalised SMS messages to the cellphones of thousands of debtors every hour while providing a value-added opportunity of updating their 23 million record database.

The technology chosen by MBD to deploy this automated SMS application is a highly scalable, business-class solution called CellSys, a product of SMS Cellular Services. During the past five years the CellSys product has been tried and tested with wide variety of business applications where customer relationship management (CRM) forms a crucial and integral part of the company's revenue model.

Integrating CellSys into MBD's back-end CRM systems has meant that data such as the debtor's name and title and his/her outstanding debt are all easily inserted into a message template and despatched to the cellphone number supplied.

Each individual SMS event is triggered automatically by either credit limit, amount, date, or other "trigger" parameters pre-determined by MBD as part of its SMS campaign and collection strategy. No human intervention whatsoever is required for these CRM systems to trigger an SMS despatch.

MBD is seeing immediate cost savings with the CellSys system. Outbound call centre activity is reduced as the SMS campaigns lead to significant inbound call centre activity. Costly telephone calls are now no longer the first line of contact with debtors, but are reserved, for example, for contacting debtors via MBD's American-developed dialler system at either their work or residential telephone landline numbers.

In addition, any text messages which could not be delivered, possibly because the cellphone number supplied was incorrect or because the user has been disconnected, are routed back to the source, allowing call centre agents to update their contact database, and tipping them off to initiate some new form of contact.

There are several other advantages, which prompted MBD to implement the CellSys system. MBD required a system that would be scalable to cope with future business, possibly involving up to a million debt collections a month. The full audit trail provided for with each message despatched through the CellSys server meant that SMS costs could easily be allocated to specific collections projects. Call centre reporting could also be augmented with data from the CellSys server and used to gauge the overall effectiveness of the operation.

"The information provided by the CellSys system allows MBD to report on how many cellular numbers represent valid debtor contact cellular numbers and which numbers do not. It also provides MBD with the opportunity to provide their client base with more detailed reporting information relating to their communication campaigns," says Barry Prinsloo, SMS Cellular Services sales director.

MBD is a strategically focused law firm specialising in the provision of pre-delinquent, delinquent and legal debt collection services to major JSE Securities Exchange-listed retail, financial services and furniture organisations as well the larger public sector organisations.

Traditionally each account holder would either be contacted via an outbound telephone or letter campaign and accordingly be informed of outstanding amounts. Each call initiated would result in the negotiation of a settlement between the call centre operator and the debtor, and these agreements are then captured onto the MBD Cheetah collection system.

"Should MBD make one phone call every month to each of its debtors under management, at more than R1 per call, it would easily cost the firm in excess of a couple of hundred thousand rand," says Basson. "On the other hand, sending these debtors an SMS costs less than 20c per message, and the entire process is automated."

MBD experimented with several systems before deciding on the CellSys product. MBD is now investigating opportunities to unlock additional features such as allowing recipients to reply by SMS and have the text message written straight back into the CRM system or customer files.