Telecoms organisations face a highly challenging business environment as digitisation continues to fuel the relentless disruption of established business models and practices, to enable increasing competition from new, more agile, entrants and forces constant regulatory changes as the market grapples with the societal shift to living and conducting business online.

The second year of the pandemic has seen more people in the UK slide further into debt and organisations need to recalibrate their response through empathetic collections.

You don’t have to be involved in collections to be aware that the last 18 months have affected the financial circumstances of a huge number of people.

Christmas may well have come early in the FCA’s Consumer Duty feedback and consultation paper with more meaningful proposals for firms in the pursuit of delivering benefits for consumers. There’s not much detail in the underpinning cost/benefit analysis, but with only a nine-month implementation timescale, the New Year may well bring a costly hangover if firms aren’t preparing now.

Is your organisation ready for human-centred collections?

Treating customers with empathy has been an increasingly important area of focus within the customer experience industry.

We’ve just commissioned some independent research into “Fairness in Collections” to gain a deeper insight into the issues facing people who are in debt.

The pandemic isn’t only affecting us as individuals – it’s affecting us as societies and economies too.

Angela Knowles-Ellis, Head of Telephony at a Capita run contact centre in Darlington, explains how training from bereavement charity Winston’s Wish has helped staff deal with vulnerable customers during the pandemic.

One of the things that the pandemic has surfaced is increasing inequality. The impact of Covid- 19 continues to take its toll not only on people’s physical and mental health but also on their financial stability.