Collect / Recover
Compliant collections and promise-to-pay
A customer just missed an instalment — the next conversation decides whether you recover the balance and keep them, or lose both.
What it does
Collections is where most companies burn the relationships they spent the most to build: scripted call-center pressure, tone-deaf letters, and no memory of anything the customer said last time. Done badly it also creates regulatory exposure — FDCPA, FCA rules, Consumer Duty. The agent works the whole arc from pre-delinquency to overdue: it makes outbound promise-to-pay calls with identity verification, a plain explanation of the balance and consequences, and a concrete way out — same-day payment through a secure link, a structured plan, or a late-fee waiver as an incentive. When it hears hardship, it stops collecting and switches to a vulnerability procedure: gathering income and expenditure, then recommending a forbearance arrangement for a human to approve. Every contact lands inside policy, on the record, and in a tone that keeps the customer.
How it works
- 1Trigger. an account crosses a delinquency threshold — a missed instalment, an invoice past due, a broken promise-to-pay, or a pre-delinquency risk score — or an inbound collections callback arrives.
- 2Decision. the agent reads the account: balance, arrears state, payment and contact history, prior promises, hardship and vulnerability flags. It checks contact windows, frequency caps, and disclosure requirements against the compliance policy, and a judge gates every outbound contact before it goes.
- 3Action. an outbound call or message opens with identity verification, then states the balance and what happens next in plain language, and offers the resolution menu — settle today via a secure payment link to the client's hosted payment step, commit to a structured plan, or take the late-fee waiver for paying now. Each promise-to-pay is recorded with an amount and a date.
- 4Follow-through. callback cadences are scheduled and kept; kept and broken promises are tracked and followed up; hardship signals route to the income-and-expenditure sub-procedure with a human approving any forbearance. Inbound callbacks land with full account context instead of a cold start. If the payment arrives on its own, pending outreach is cancelled. Every contact, disclosure, and commitment writes back to a full audit trail.
Configuration
How the agent is wired for this use case.
- Loan servicing / billing system · read balance, arrears state, payment and contact history, prior promises, and hardship flags
- Messaging channel · place outbound calls and messages with identity verification, state the balance and consequences, offer the resolution menu
- Payment provider · hand off to the client's hosted payment step for the secure same-day payment link; the agent never touches card data
- CRM · record each promise-to-pay with an amount and date, schedule and keep callback cadences
- Audit log · write every contact, disclosure, and commitment to a full audit trail
What you need
The inputs this use case runs on. Your channels stay yours; the agent supplies the judgment.
Signals
delinquency events (payment_missed, days-past-due thresholds), broken promise-to-pay, pre-delinquency risk scores, inbound callback requests
Data
balance and arrears state, payment and contact history, prior promises and plans, hardship and vulnerability flags, consent and contact-window preferences
Guardrails
FDCPA/FCA/Consumer Duty rules encoded as policy — contact windows, frequency caps, required disclosures; identity verification before any account detail; judge gating on every outbound contact; hardship detection with human-approved forbearance only; stale-outreach cancellation on payment; a complete audit trail of every contact
Metrics it moves
- recovered-revenueoverdue balances resolve as same-day payments or kept payment plans instead of aging into write-offs and external agencies
- conversion-ratea published lending-agent deployment in this category reports 60% of collections conversations converting to a payment commitment
- csatthe same deployment holds 98% CSAT in collections, the strongest evidence that recovery at scale does not have to cost the relationship
Related use cases
See it on your own customer journey
Bring one drop-off, one churn cliff, or one silent segment. We will show you what a proactive agent with memory and judgment does with it.
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