LiveVox Data Reveals Collection Agencies Need to Implement Right-Party Scripting to Avoid Wasting Labor Costs

SAN FRANCISCO — LiveVox, the leading provider of hosted-dialer solutions, today announced the release of data from the past year that reveals credit and collection organizations are wasting labor costs if they fail to utilize Right-Party Scripting. Due to low industry contact rates agencies run the risk that agents do not achieve maximum productivity.

Right-Party Scripting transfers only callers who verify they are Right Party Contacts (RPCs) to agents. This enables agents to spend time focused on speaking with consumers instead of wasting time with the wrong person, or waiting for calls.

LiveVox data from the past 12 months showed that 2.4% to 4% of calls answered by a live person ultimately resulted in an RPC. This shows that without Right-Party Scripting agents can spend more than 96% of the time connecting to the wrong people. Furthermore, this would indicate a need for line capacity of between 25-42 lines per agent to maintain utmost agent productivity. Without these measures, agent productivity could be severely impacted.

The Question of Capacity

Agencies with traditional premised-based dialers are also suffering from line starvation as RPC rates, based on total call attempts, have been less than 1% every month during the past year. Running a premised dialer at even four lines-per agent given current connect rates is insufficient to maximize agent productivity.

“On average, a collector costs about $0.30 per minute, far and away an agency’s largest and most crucial expense,” said John McNamara, Chief Marketing Officer, LiveVox. “In this environment, the toughest I have seen, agencies can only be successful if they fully utilize their agents. Right-Party Scripting is the best way to manage increased account volumes and lower liquidation rates by connecting agents to double the amount of debtors they currently reach.”

With Right-Party Scripting, agencies can increase their Right-Party Contacts to eight to 12 per agent, per hour — two or three times that achieved with premised-based dialers.

Seasonality and Saturday Staffing

System flexibility becomes especially important during seasonal changes in debtor contact rates. During the past summer, when consumers typically become more difficult to contact, RPC rates fell by as much as 25-30%. These trends reveal agencies must have the ability to scale dialing capacity to address seasonal contact rates in order to achieve the same level of RPCs.

The data also shed light into Saturday staffing. Conventional wisdom says Saturdays are much better days to reach debtors, but in fact, the results were mixed. In some months, Saturdays resulted in RPC rates more than 50% better compared with the rest of the week, but in others the Saturday lift was negligible, less than 10%.

Detailed LiveVox reporting, driven by the company’s integrated ACD, provides organizations with complete insight into their operations to determine the staffing levels and dialing capacity to meet their needs.

“Collection organizations simply cannot sustain changes in contact rates while tied to fixed, insufficient telephony and seat licenses,” said Louis Summe, Chief Executive Officer, LiveVox. “Collection agencies need solutions that provide the capacity and workforce flexibility to manage volumes and increase contacts. With the LiveVox Hosted Dialer, companies will never be under provisioned or over provisioned from a capacity standpoint, and with recent releases of features such as QuickTrace, SmartMessage and Skills-Based Routing, we continue to advance dialing technology for the collection industry.”

About LiveVox
LiveVox is the first provider of hosted dialer solutions for the credit and collections industry. Breakthrough, patented technology and deep industry knowledge allow LiveVox to assist clients with optimizing their operations and collection strategies. Private, carrier-grade VoIP networks enable LiveVox to maximize the productivity of leading credit, collections, debt purchase and call center organizations at the lowest cost of ownership in the marketplace. LiveVox is headquartered in San Francisco. For more information, visit www.livevox.com.