The outbound dialer was reaching under a third of the book, and the third it reached mostly resented it. Meanwhile the same customers were answering WhatsApp within minutes, just not to anybody at the lender.
The hard part was not the messaging
Sending a WhatsApp template is trivial. Running a collections conversation is not. The agent has to hold a negotiating position, recognise hardship, honour a settlement it offered four messages ago, take a payment mid-conversation, and recognise when to disengage entirely. That last one is the part that actually matters.
- Hard stops on frequency, hours and language, enforced in the runtime rather than in the prompt.
- A settlement ladder the agent can walk down but never past, with each rung a policy object, not a suggestion.
- Instant handoff to a human on any distress signal, dispute, or legal keyword.
- Every message, offer and payment written to BM CRM as it happens, so the ledger is never behind the conversation.
- Contact rate
- 94%
- First reply
- 2s
- Promise-to-pay kept
- +38%
- Cost per recovery
- −62%
The disengagement rules cost us recoveries in month one and won them back by month three. Customers who were not chased into a corner came back and settled. That is not a soft finding. It showed up in the roll rates.
“We expected to recover more. We didn't expect complaints to fall by two thirds at the same time.”