Last year, Overdales secured broadly a fifth of all judgments registered in the British Isles. We answered 380,105 inbound calls and facilitated the recovery of debts originating in the financial services, telecommunications, utilities and retail finance sectors.
With a wide range of options available to support our clients secure and recover debts, and the ability to do so at genuine scale, one of the questions we often get asked is how we manage quality, monitor outcomes and continue to drive improvement when dealing with so many debts.
Recently I took some time out with our Commercial Director, Mark Platts, to chat through this very topic, focusing on my thoughts for my role, it’s importance to delivering service, enhancing future propositions, and what role Consumer Duty might play moving forward.
So, my role was formed in November 2021, initially to provide assurance as the 1st line of defence for our business. Since that time, I have broadened the team to add strength to our business by delivering the right level of assurance across all customer facing teams, as well as some of our third-party suppliers such as our High Court Enforcement partners. Recently I’ve taken over the learning & development function too, which really helps close the loop, to ensure anything we spot in our assurance process can be traced back to the start, for example has it been trained out incorrectly, misunderstood by advisors or is it a new requirement that’s emerging.
I’m responsible for ensuring that everyone acts in our clients’ best interests by securing the right outcome for them, and their customers. My role is broad in that I’m involved in some way with all departments across Overdales, both supporting and delivering changes, driving improvements and I work closely with our Senior Leadership team, providing comfort that the business is delivering all our client, regulatory and customer requirements.
For me, each customer interaction has to be seen as a chance to test what we do today, how effective it was across all parts of the customer’s journey, and how do we continue to find ways to make it stronger tomorrow. That’s why it’s operational assurance and not just quality assurance. One is interested in ensuring we complied with our minimum standards, the other is interested in taking a broader look and assessment across all touch points and spotting if something innocuous at Part A could become something significant by the time we arrive at Part D of our process.
If you think about classical quality assurance, in a more traditional customer service environment, high repetition, recurring journeys, huge opportunities to channel shift or transform the experience. There will of course be parts of that here too. The basic construct is likely repetitive from the perspective that the customer is in debt, we’ve been engaged to support recovery if possible, but now overlay originating sector, is it regulated or non-regulated debt, what’s the balance threshold for court, is the customer vulnerable, has this been historically missed. If we look past consumer debt, and towards commercial debt, what if the debtor is a business potentially heading towards administration, the approach and considerations in that situation will be vastly different and require a different approach altogether.
But this is where operational assurance kicks in, we are assessing all stage gates in our journey, to ensure we haven’t missed something, that we were right to do what we did today, and crucially, maximising chances of recovery, if we find means and ability to pay.
And let’s not forget that key point here, this isn’t assurance in a customer service setting, this is in Legal operations. Whilst first and foremost, we are here to deliver the best outcome we can for our clients – which will include ensuring we reach a good outcome for their customer.
Working within a law firm and dealing with litigation matters, it’s not as simple as traditional debt recovery, we have set principles we have to follow set out by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) which help support us make the correct decisions, and the corresponding relationship with the customer journey. The red flags that I look out for are how we have communicated; have we been clear and transparent as to the status of the account and the solutions available, but also, have we secured the best outcome for our client.
I have seen examples in previous businesses where setting up a repayment plan for a customer may have been deemed as a good outcome, however there were opportunities to clear the debt sooner, supporting the customer becoming debt free but also the client securing the balance back in a more timely manner – this is fundamental in how we run our business.
General throughput for us is upwards of 300,000 accounts per annum, the debts span financial services, telco, utilities and retail finance. So, you might assume that such variety causes significant additional complexity for us, well you might be surprised to learn that, no it doesn’t, not massively anyway!
We have very strong and robust procedures in place to ensure that we meet our client’s regulatory requirements, irrelevant of what sector the debt has come from. There may be nuances but substantively our existing practices are fit for purpose in most scenarios due to the size we operate at and how much inherent experiences that drives out.
We also have an extensive backdrop of business and wide-ranging underlying product knowledge, which drives a clear understanding of what is expected across each client, product or portfolio and this is supported by our continuous learning and development offered to all employees. As such, most of what we do quickly, and easily flexes.
Across the first half of the year, I’ve been involved in our Consumer Duty readiness activity, ensuring the business can comply with these requirements by the 31st July. This has been a huge success allowing us an opportunity to revisit all our procedures, content, customer contact, training etc. and ensure everything is fit for purpose – it actually offered a fantastic opportunity to re-evaluate our underlying practices again, as it’s not lost on any of us at Overdales that things constantly change and evolve, requiring regular revisits to keep processes optimal.
Whilst Consumer Duty is specific to regulated debt, we’ve taken steps to align our quality assurance outcomes so that we have a universal approach across all business areas, no matter the debt type or regulation. Moving forward, we will continue to test customer outcomes to ensure that this has been embedded and with time we will of course continue to make improvements. Early days, but so far, I’m seeing only positive impacts on my role because of Consumer Duty.
To summarise then – Overdales handle substantial scale, we specialise in debt recovery and through our robust assurance processes we can service regulated and non-regulated debt, and we continue to optimise the policies, propositions, and processes we deploy to maximise our clients’ chances of recoveries, whilst also striking the appropriate balance of working with customers where their circumstances require it.
And finally, ignore Mark and his reference in conversations that this is all in a day’s work for Keagan. I’m lucky to lead a phenomenally talented team, we take pride in what we do, and we continue to search for ways to improve...I’m sure you can appreciate having read this, quite how much must go on in a “day’s work!”
By Keagan Portrey
18.08.2023