The consumer desire for a brighter Christmas amidst continuing Covid-19 restrictions has seen a sharp rise in ‘buy now pay later’ schemes, and with furlough ending and depression rates rising, a perfect storm lies ahead for all collections teams as consumers juggle multiple payment demands.

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.

At a recent roundtable in partnership with Wired, Doug Brown, Head of Data, Cyber and AI Guild and Chief Data Scientist of Capita Consulting, was joined by Lisa Talia Moretti, a digital sociologist at the Ministry of Justice; Reid Darby, innovation lead at Golden Valley Development in Cheltenham; Carly Kind, Director at the Ada Lovelace Institute and Tavi Kotka, an engineer/entrepreneur and former Chief Information Officer for the Estonian government to discuss data, identity and the digital citizen.

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.

The Covid-19 pandemic has presented enormous challenges across society and contributed to the widening of inequalities across many measures.

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.

For many people, being released from prison can be a daunting prospect. According to UK charity Prison Reform Trust, a significant number of those entering the prison system suffer from mental health issues and learning disabilities, with up to 62% of offenders having a reading age of 11 or lower.

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.

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

While technology offers many opportunities to deliver a more proactive and efficient customer experience, it’s the human interactions between brands and their customers that often make the difference.