Customer Debt
When working together, we really value the contribution and material impact made by BFY's team, creating an ambitious and high achieving project environment whilst also passing on their expertise to the team. What pleases me most is the creation “one team” environment, which supports the delivery of one collective goal.
Customer Debt
Optimise your approach to customer debt
Customer debt is tricky to manage. A careful, but effective approach is needed to mitigate the risks of revenue loss, reputational damage, and regulatory action. Debt isn’t a new problem, but its impact is severely heightened in today’s climate, with the cost of living crisis forcing more and more customers into financial difficulty.
For suppliers, this is creating the perfect storm. Rising debt levels are detracting from bottom-line performance, while collections teams and processes are being stretched like never before, lacking the capabilities needed to take control of this extreme situation. Although there’s good reason to be concerned, it’s important to remember that you’re not powerless. A balance between cash collection and customer support is achievable, with the right direction on where and how to act.
At BFY, we can help you to enhance your approach to managing debt, building a high performing, risk-focussed collections process. Our expertise in this area is powerful and unique, leveraging industry insight and benchmarking data to realise transformational improvements.
We can help with:
- Diagnosing the root causes of your customer debt challenges
- Benchmarking your performance against industry best practice
- Identifying debt drivers and recognising opportunities through debt book analysis
- Optimising campaigns and collections through tactical action
- Enhancing your debt strategy with automation, systems, and specialist treatments
- Extracting value from uncollected debt by advising on a debt sale
BFY has supported the implementation of best practice debt book segmentation, allowing us to gain better insight around debt that is out of process and recommended actions needed to improve processes. They also helped us to develop agent level performance tracking, leading to improved call success rates.
Deliver lasting improvements through unique debt solutions
Different customer segments require unique debt solutions. Whether you’re looking to prevent new customers from entering the cycle, or engaging with vulnerable customers who are already deep within it, specific knowledge and skills should be applied to manage the situation effectively. With each of these unique scenarios playing out at once, you may feel like you can’t see the wood for the trees. This is where external insight can prove to be invaluable.
Our solutions are curated to cover the full scope of your debt challenges. We hold experience in delivering improvements at each stage of the debt cycle, combining insight with action to help you play to your strengths, and address your weaknesses. Our support is flexible, meaning you can engage our experts for immediate tactical improvements, or a full end-to-end debt transformation. We also make it our priority to set you up for future success. By embedding our knowledge within your operation, we equip you with the capabilities to continue managing debt effectively, long after you’ve worked with us.
Customer Debt
Meet the Team
Rachel Littlewood
Director
Rachel leads our operational and financial turnaround engagements, helping to solve complex operational challenges while maximising commercial performance and customer outcomes.
Kevin Scott
Director
Kevin leads client engagements with a laser focus on empowering clients to navigate large-scale events and market challenges.
Kev Brown
Senior Manager
Kev leads continuous improvement and lean transformation projects with our clients, supporting customer operations to deliver our Leadership and People Excellence programme.
Jonathan Paton
Senior Manager
Jon specialises in Customer Operations leadership, customer contact, and operational service delivery transformation/improvement.
Jon Vincent
Client Director
Jon helps clients resolve problems with billing, settlements, and customer service.
Joseph Cooper
Manager
Joseph supports our Retail clients to improve their operational processes and business performance.
Customer Debt
Our Impact
Cash recovery initiatives deliver ~£275m benefit for large Energy supplier
Our debt team supported a large Energy supplier with recovering their cash position, achieving a total benefit of ~£275m through collaborative initiatives.
Identifying ~£30m cash benefit through debt maturity assessment
We partnered with an energy supplier to assess the maturity of their ~£150m debt book, identifying ~£30m of potential cash benefit through a series of tactical and strategic improvements.
Collecting ~£10m cash through debt campaigns for an energy supplier
We partnered with a medium-sized energy supplier to overlay digital capability onto their debt management process and run bespoke campaigns, leading to improved customer engagement and collections performance.
Customer Debt
Our Insights
How to Tackle the Energy Debt Crisis. Thoughts from BFY, EDF, E.ON Next and Utility Warehouse
Why does energy debt keep rising, and who’s responsible for reducing it? We gathered industry leaders from EDF, E.ON Next and Utility Warehouse in our latest webinar to talk things through. The webinar recording is available but here’s a summary of the frank and insightful discussion.
Rethinking prepayment debt: Insights from Utilita's Chief Customer Contact Officer
In the first of our big discussions with energy industry experts, Director Kevin Scott sat down with Louise Walsh, Chief Customer Contact Officer at Utilita. We addressed the proposed Debt Relief Scheme (DRS), its potential impact on the prepayment market, whether it goes far enough, and Louise shared her ideas about what good customer support looks like for this diverse customer segment.
Podcast: Preparing for the Future of Prepay with Utilita's Louise Walsh
We've launched the first episode in our Expert Interview series, where we sit down with senior leaders from across the utilities sector, starting with Louise Walsh, Chief Customer Contact Officer at Utilita.
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