In This Edition

• ☑️ Auditing the Consumer Experience

• 🔎 Find the Friction - Before Consumers Do

• 📈 Flip the Script—Fixing the Friction

• ⏳ Set a Cadence for Re-Evaluation

• 🎓 Links for the Learners

• 💡Tip of the Week

• ⌛Recap From Last Week

• 🙌 Sharing is Caring

Every interaction with your company is a test. Consumers ask themselves: "Is this easy, enjoyable, and worth my time?"

If the answer is no—or even if they expect the answer to be no—they leave.

Most companies don’t even realize they’re failing this test. Consumers leave after needing to make their 37th click while navigating their payment portal or after needing to authenticate themselves to the 3rd rep they talked to over the phone. And the consumers’ frustration - and the missed opportunity - disappear without any acknowledgement or tracking. 

Don’t let this happen!

Great consumer experiences don’t happen by accident. They happen by design. If you don’t control the experience, consumer frustration will. And recoveries will evaporate without you even knowing. 

Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen using the best tool I know: The consumer experience audit.

☑️ Auditing the Consumer Experience

Start by reviewing, testing, and auditing every step in the consumer journey. Don’t rely on internal assumptions—get fresh eyes on the experience. Have multiple people outside your department go through the process and provide feedback. Their perspective will highlight pain points your team may overlook due to familiarity. I’ve even had my wife help with this (thanks, Liv!).

Be brutally honest. If something is frustrating to navigate, fix it. If an interaction feels cold or impersonal, humanize it.

🔎 Find the Friction - Before Consumers Do

Your goal is to eliminate sources of friction. And to do that, you need to be ruthless when grading your current experience. Anything less than perfect should be marked as an area for improvement—because when it comes to consumer experience, good isn’t good enough. Your goal is to create an effortless, frustration-free journey.

Use my Consumer Experience Improvement tool to methodically evaluate every touchpoint. Document every single issue you find. Every quirk, every suboptimal experience or workflow. They need to be methodically uncovered and itemized before they can be addressed.

Here are common friction points to identify and address:

• Long hold times

• Too many call transfers

• Not reaching a human at all

• Perceived rudeness or lack of empathy

• Rigid policies that block reasonable solutions

• Slow or nonexistent follow-ups

• Complex authentication processes

• Difficult-to-find or cumbersome online portals

• Lack of transparency

• Limited payment options

• Inability to communicate using their desired channel

• Unable to understand or utilize different payment options

• Difficult to dispute

If any of these issues sound familiar, you have work to do. And if you're unsure, assume there's room for improvement. A perfect experience isn’t an accident—it’s an ongoing commitment to eliminating every single point of friction.

📈 Flip the Script—Fixing the Friction

Now, take each friction point and document every possible solution. Use the Solutions section of the Experience Tool to log solutions and evaluate them based on:

• Ease of implementation – How quickly and easily can this solution be put into place?

• Cost to implement – What financial or resource investment is required?

• Number of issues resolved – Does this fix multiple friction points at once?

Prioritizing solutions this way ensures that you address the highest-leverage problems first. If you’re doing it right, you will likely find that some fixes solve multiple issues, maximizing your effort.

Some ideas to help you get started. You’ll notice that some ideas appear as possible solutions for multiple problems.:

🚀 Long hold times? Improve call routing, increase staffing, implement AI-driven scheduling, and optimize IVR/IVA systems to direct consumers more efficiently.
🚀 Too many transfers? Cross-train staff to handle multiple concerns, streamline internal communication, and implement warm transfers to ensure continuity, better route calls from main IVR.
🚀 Not reaching a human at all? Expand office hours, integrate live chat and callback options, better route calls from main IVR and enhance self-service tools with AI-powered assistance.
🚀 Perceived rudeness or lack of empathy? Train staff on active listening, tone control, and conflict resolution; monitor calls for coaching opportunities, implement QA and tone/intent analysis.
🚀 Rigid policies that block reasonable solutions? Empower agents with more flexibility to offer alternative solutions like payment plans or fee adjustments, add more negotiation ability to your web portal/IVR.
🚀 Slow or nonexistent follow-ups? Set clear follow-up timeframes, automate reminders, and implement case-tracking systems for accountability.
🚀 Complex authentication processes? Reduce verification steps while maintaining security, use warm transfers to prevent the need for re-authentication when transferring between departments, use unique hyperlinks to prevent authentication to access web portals.
🚀 Difficult-to-find or cumbersome online portals? Improve site navigation, provide clear instructions, simplify the login and navigation experience, use mobile wallet to remember payment methods.
🚀 Lack of transparency? Offer real-time account updates, ensure clear communication on policies, and create FAQ resources that address common concerns.
🚀 Limited payment options? Introduce digital wallets, flexible payment plans, and real-time processing to give consumers greater convenience.
🚀 Inability to communicate using their desired channel? Support text, email, phone, and chat options to ensure consumers can reach you in the way they prefer.
🚀 Unable to understand or utilize different payment options? Provide clear, step-by-step instructions on all payment methods, use web chat to solve simple questions, update IVR/phone scripting.
🚀 Difficult to dispute? Add electronic dispute options everywhere consumers go, streamline dispute submission, provide clear instructions, and implement digital dispute tracking for faster resolutions.

This process might feel repetitive, but that’s intentional. Fully exploring every problem and every possible solution ensures you identify the most effective fixes. Remember, you can’t prioritize everything—focus on solving the highest-leverage issues first for the biggest impact.

⏳ Set a Cadence for Re-Evaluation

Improving consumer experience isn’t a one-and-done project. Build time into your schedule to re-audit quarterly. Consumer expectations evolve, and your experience must evolve with them.

Candidly, this is where I’ve struggled. It’s easy to audit parts of your process when you see smoke and want to know if you have a fire a burning. It takes much more discipline to commit to an audit schedule and proactively find areas to improve. This where I need to improve!

🚀 The Bottom Line

People expect the worst when dealing with a collection agency. That’s your opportunity to flip the narrative.

A well-designed consumer experience builds trust, reduces complaints, and drives higher recoveries. Small, thoughtful changes compound into massive results. And as an added bonus? Your team will thank you for eliminating the “annoyance” questions that stem from confusing, frustrating processes.

So pause. Take this exercise seriously. Find the friction, remove it, and watch how much smoother the process—and your results—become.

Because if you don’t control the experience, consumer frustration will.

🎓 Links for the Learners

•  📖 Turmoil - and speculation about their future - continues at the CFPB. News that up to 100 CFPB employees were laid off hit this morning.

• 📖 Struggling consumers are increasingly looking to short-term strategies to manage higher expenses.

• 𝕏 Did anyone else notice that some Google reviews disappeared from business pages over the weekend?

 💡Tip of the Week

I found a new tool that I want to share! Scribe records your screen actions as you take them, allowing you to automatically create SOPs, help guides, tutorials and more.

It seems very similar to Guidde, which I’ve found to be quite useful. I’m looking forward to finding an excuse to compare the two side by side.

⌛ Last Week Lowdown

ICYMI: Highlights from last week’s edition. Click here to view the entire post.

1. How to identify commoditized services and opportunities for cost savings with vendors

2. How we reduced our costs of emailing consumers and using ringless voicemail by 80%

3. Ideas for places to find cost savings opportunities hiding in plain sight

🙌 Sharing is Caring

Are we on the same wavelength? Check out EngageARM.com for free resources, networking, and in-depth tutorials to help you build a highly-effective recovery department.

I’d like to close this with a quick ask. If you enjoyed this, please share with a colleague. Even better, take advantage of the referral program (linked below). If you disliked it, let me know why. All feedback is good feedback, after all.

Cheers,

Nate

EngageARM.com