THE IMPORTANCE OF FIELD KNOWLEDGE
DON’T UNDERESTIMATE ‘DOORSTEP’ DATA

PERCH GROUP

A year ago, my colleague Rob Oxley wrote in a CCTA Magazine article that “a one size fits all approach to consumer debt recovery isn’t effective” but accepted that “a fully tailored approach to each and every customer isn’t possible – or at least not without access to quality data.”

In 2024, there’s no doubt that customer data is king. But, in the ‘techy’ age, there is often a misconception that the most valuable data comes from digital sources. While data needs to be digitised to get the maximum value from it, it also needs to be accurate and authentic and, when we forget about real people and their real circumstances and rely on just what the digital data is telling us, we don’t get the full picture.

We’ve taken a doorstep-driven approach to digital data gathering which has enriched and enhanced the quality of our data to enable a truly tailored approach.

Since we launched Verify, Perch Group’s ‘intelligent’ field services firm, in August 2023, we’ve taken a doorstep-driven approach to digital data gathering which has enriched and enhanced the quality of our data to enable a truly tailored approach.

So, while Verify’s customer reconnection and verification team has been able to draw on Perch Group’s existing data to make better informed approaches to the hardest to reach customers, we’ve also been able to feed intelligence back into the wider debt lifecycle that we’ve gathered on the doorstep. This is where the benefit of our full-service, fully integrated, Group-wide approach to debt resolution really comes in.

Of the domestic and commercial customers visited on the doorstep:

• 17% couldn’t read or write in English
• 23% had a visible vulnerability
• 37% didn’t understand what a QR code was or how to use it
• 14% relied on their children’s technology to access the internet
• 28% didn’t know what a credit file was or how it would affect them

While we knew there were customers who were digitally excluded, we didn’t know the extent of it until we reached out to them ‘in the field’. The intelligence gathered through our welfare and reconnection visits, isn’t something we could ever get from a database – until now. By feeding all this insight back into our customer data platform, we’re able to build a rich tapestry of information about specific circumstances that can inform not just our field strategies but our wider debt collection and litigation strategies to ensure the best possible customer outcomes.

When we say that Perch Group is ‘powered by technology, driven by people’ we really mean it. While we utilise the absolute latest technology from our state-of-the-art field services app and case management system, to the use of field audio and QR codes, we also know that we are dealing with real people and they need a people-centred approach. There doesn’t need to be such a thing as ‘computer says no’ when you are face-to-face with a customer.

When we set out to revolutionise field services with Verify, we took a leap into something that many believed was an out-dated model, but we knew that ‘doorstep data’ was still valuable and we just needed to find a way to harness it that worked for the modern world. We’re confident that we’ve done just that.