Vodacom Chooses Experian's Tallyman System To Manage Customers Behind On Their Bills

Vodacom Chooses Experian's Tallyman System To Manage Customers Behind On Their Bills

Vodacom South Africa has chosen the Tallyman debt management and collection system from Experian, the global information services company, to manage customers in arrears.

Vodacom's use of Experian's debt management and collection system will enable it to minimise provisioning and bad-debt write offs. Initially Tallyman will be used to manage both high-usage accounts with large bills and those customers already in arrears.

Having trialled a number of other collections systems, Vodacom South Africa selected Experian's Tallyman system due to its ability to automate standard tasks, its customizable features and ease of integration with other customer management systems. Vodacom had been using the collections module of its billing system but realised that the Tallyman system would enable it to adopt a more targeted and personalised approach to debt collection.

Veran Kathan, Managing Executive for Credit and Risk at Vodacom, said: "The South African mobile market is increasingly competitive. Tallyman will enable us to improve the way we interact with customers behind on their bills. By treating them in a more thoughtful and personalised way we hope to be able to rehabilitate, retain and attract new customers who appreciate good service."

Experian's Tallyman customer revenue management and collection system automates the collections process by consolidating all credit-related communications, including phone calls, emails, texts, letters and faxes between an organisation and its customers into a single database. As such, Tallyman will now be the main source of information for Vodacom's collections agents, providing accurate, up-to-the-minute data.

Specifically, Tallyman will enable Vodacom to:

• Segment customers in arrears in the same way that marketing departments can segment customers and prospects using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. This will allow Vodacom to adopt a far more targeted and personalised approach to debt collection. For example, an established customer who usually settles bills on time will not be treated in the same way as a new customer who defaults on their very first payment.
• Reduce operating costs through the automation of a large number of collections activities, such as the issue of standard reminders and freeing up collections staff to focus on higher value activities. In addition, Tallyman will be integrated with the Davox dialer used by Vodacom's collections department and will automatically load all the information held about a customer onto the screen of the collector who receives the incoming call.
• Adopt a more streamlined approach to customers by feeding information from Tallyman into Vodacom's data warehouse which holds data from the billing system and other customer facing systems. This will mean that customers in arrears will not be offered other products or increased allowances.
• Co-ordinate the activities of third parties such as DCAs who will also use Tallyman as their first point of action

Brian Dewis, Managing Director of Experian's Tallyman business, said: "Operators around the world are looking for proven ways to improve customer service, reduce churn and increase revenues. Tallyman does all three and is easy to integrate with existing customer management systems".

Tallyman is designed for organisations that grant credit to consumers and that also provide consumer credit as part of their business model, such as financial organisations, retailers, utilities and communications companies.

Experian's Tallyman system is also being used by a number of other operators including SingTel and M1 in Singapore, Tata Teleservices (TTSL) in India, Maxis in Malaysia, AAPT in Australia.

For further information on the press release please contact:
Beatriz Sanjuan, Media Relations Experian Decision Analytics EMEA
Tel: +34 617 390 451
Email: beatriz.sanjuan@experian-scorex.es