The behavior of customers and how they pay changes over time. Those changes have different causes, like the state of the economy. That can mean that an approach to managing overdue payments, which used to work well, may no longer be the best one.

Besides changes in behavior, you might also come up with new ideas and insights yourself, which you think could lead to better results.

But how do you know objectively what works best?

By measuring. Data shows objectively what leads to a better outcome, which is why you want to test your ideas. Credit management software like MA!N offers a Champion Challenger feature that helps you do exactly that in practice.

How does it work? You have a group of customers that you handle according to Profile A. That means sending correspondence by mail, email, and SMS.

Each action can have a number of possible outcomes:

  • The customer pays.
  • The customer promises to pay.
  • The customer sets up a payment plan.
  • The customer disputes the claim.
  • Other responses.
  • No response.

MA!N keeps track of which outcome follows from which action, so you can see how effective an action is.

The next step is checking what happens if you, for example, carry out an action at a different time or replace it with another action.

To do this, you split the customers in Profile A into two groups. You create a new Profile A-1 and assign 5%–10% of the customers to it. The rest stay in Profile A.

After a test period, you look at the results. You do this on different levels:

  • Overall, you check whether there are differences in how fast payments come in.
  • On a micro level, you look at the effect of doing an action at a different time or replacing it with another action.

If the results of the Challenger (in this example Profile A-1) are positive, you assign more customers to Profile A-1 step by step. If that keeps producing better results, then A-1 eventually becomes the main profile.

When you have enough data, you can also look into using AI for this process. The condition is that you need a suitable model and enough data. For many organizations, that last part is a hurdle, but as we show, there are good alternatives.

With a Champion Challenger, you can easily try out a different approach and back it up with real-world tests, so you can get the best results. This way, you take credit management to the next level.