Volkswagen Bank Improves Debt Recovery Rate With Altitude Software Solution

Altitude Software, the leading independent global contact center solutions vendor, today announces that Volkswagen Bank, the financial services provider of the Volkswagen Group sales network in France, reports greatly improved debt recovery rates after deploying the Altitude uCI^TM customer interaction management solution at its customer service center at Villers-Cotterêts.

The Volkswagen Bank offers financial services, such as vehicle finance, direct bank business, insurance products, leasing, and fleet management to Volkswagen, Skoda, Audi and Seat customers in France. The Volkswagen Group is in France since 1960 and is a major force in the auto market with a 11,9% market share, 15,000 employees and more than a thousand points of sale and service. In 2010, Volkswagen customer numbers grew by 20-25% with a corresponding increase in debt collection needs. This triggered a decision to select and deploy a customer interaction management platform aiming to make debt collection more effective.

The Altitude uCI multichannel contact center solution was selected and deployed in under three months and it now manages several thousand outbound and inbound calls and texts related to debt collection every month. Agent productivity and debt recovery rates have greatly increased since.

The Altitude uCI solution enabled Volkswagen Bank to become more efficient and effective at debt collection while ensuring compliance with regulations and enabling fair debt collection practices. According to Marc Pazos, Debt Recovery Director at Volkswagen Bank, “The Altitude uCI solution helped us manage growing customer debt, by optimizing our calls, automating agent tasks, retrieving and feeding customer interaction information to our CRM system. This enabled us to be more effective, without becoming annoying or alienating the customers.”

A key project goal was to increase debt recovery rates without losing quality in customer service. So, the availability of a powerful dialler solution – Altitude’s Unified Dialer – was key to enable more contacts in less time with better results. As was Altitude uCI’s easy integration with Volkswagen Banks internal system called EKIP.

EKIP is a CRM System, shared by all the Bank’s departments, that now seamlessly provides rich customer information to the contact center agent, including customer credit history and contact track record. It is completely integrated with Altitude’s Agent Desktop and Altitude’s Unified Dialer. This enables automatic outbound call generation, context-rich customer contacts, and provides the Bank with accurate metrics on operations and debt collection contacts results, that are all automatically registered on EKIP. As a result, agents are more productive, more effective, focused on results and dedicate more time to higher value-added tasks.

“Resource optimization and strong dialling capabilities are at the heart of every debt collection operation as operational success is measured according to the number of customers reached and ultimately, the amount of recovered revenue.” states René Esline, Altitude Software General Manager in France. “Altitude Software solutions enable companies to maximize debtor contact rates, provide agents with a unified desktop with immediate access to data, and ensure compliance regulations”.

Altitude Software is the leader of unified customer interaction solutions, managing dynamic contact centres independently of platforms since 1993. Used by 250.000 users in about 900 customers of 60 countries, Altitude is recognized for customer satisfaction levels and is ISO 9001 and TSIA certified for its customer support worldwide. Its innovations have won 40+ industry awards and Gartner includes Altitude in its Magic Quadrant, as the only global independent vendor since 2000.

Altitude uCI (unified customer interactions) is an open software suite that manages high volume customer interactions with the enterprise like Customer Service, Help Desk, Collections, Telesales, Surveys, etc; It is valued the most for its speed in creating and changing CRM Services and Campaigns, thanks to its Unified Design Studio, Open Desktop, Routing, Dialler, Voice Portal, Monitoring, Reporting, Workforce and Integration Server.