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About Customer Level Strategies

Overview

A customer level strategy lets you create a collection treatment plan based on the overall age of a customer's past due balance. Unlike an invoice level strategy, which lets you define a collection treatment plan that is based on the age of an invoice, a customer level strategy provides you with the ability to create a collection treatment plan that targets action items for a selected customer, and not individual invoices for the customer.

The benefits of creating a customer level strategy are:

Elimination of redundant action items that can lead to higher collector productivity by not creating the same action items for multiple invoices.
Application of a single consistent collection treatment plan at the customer level.
Creation of a collection treatment plan that is more in alignment with a customer's payment behavior.

Note: You can create customer level strategies only if the Customer Level Strategy flag is turned on in the eCredit Admin Module.

Customer level strategy creation

You create a customer level strategy similar to the way you create an invoice level strategy, except that you select either Customer Past Due Date or Period Start Date from the Control Date drop-down list on the Branch Definition screen in the Admin module. Following branch definition, you can associate the branch to the New Invoice event in the Strategy Definition screen. You can define all other branches for promises or disputes the same way you do for an invoice level strategy and associate them to the appropriate events. You can create as many customer level strategies as required, based on your business need.

The next time an invoice is loaded, eCredit evaluates the segment ruleset and assigns the appropriate strategies to each customer in the customer level strategy. Also, eCredit creates corresponding action items in the work queue of the appropriate collector based on the workgroup assignment rules. Depending on the type of control date (Customer Past Due Date or Period Start Date ) selected for the strategy, action items for the customer will change periodically based on the new customer level strategy, or on specific events like promises or disputes that are defined in the strategy.

The customer level strategy will be applied consistently until the need arises to assign a different collection strategy for the customer. You can reset an assigned collection strategy by clicking the Reset link next to the Collection Strategy field on the customer's Basic screen. This will remove the current collection strategy and replace it with a new collection strategy, based on a segment ruleset, the next time a new invoice is loaded for the customer.

Customer level strategy categories

You can define two major categories of customer level strategy based on the following Control Date values:

Customer Past Due Date
Period Start Date

For customers who are assigned a Customer Past Due Date strategy, eCredit evaluates each customer's delinquency status based on the outstanding invoices and identifies the earliest date when the customer becomes past due. For example, if a customer has two open invoices that are 20 and 30 days past their due date respectively as of the current date, then the invoice with the higher past due date becomes the customer's past due date, and all action items will be based on this date as defined in the customer's strategy definition.

eCredit evaluates a customer's past due date on a daily basis and corresponding changes, such as adding or modifying action items, are reflected in the action items for the customer in a collector's work queue. Additionally, you can set up action items with the appropriate offset days by selecting the Customer Past Due Date value as a control date in your strategy definition. While the Customer Past Due Date strategy can be used for any customers, it is more effective for small to mid-size customers that have a low transaction volume and limited repeat business.

For customers who are assigned a Period Start Date strategy, invoice action items are created using the upcoming period start date as the control date. The period start date can be based on days, months, and years. For example, if you are using a calendar month as the period start date, the next period start date begins on the first day of the next month. Therefore, if the current date is February 23, 2009, then the next period start date will be March 1st, 2009.

Action items that are defined in this type of strategy are created for each period. This type of customer level strategy works best for customer accounts that are reviewed and collected on a period-by-period basis throughout the year. While the Period Start Date strategy can be used for any customer, it is more effective for large customers that have a high transaction volume and recurring business.

Customer Level Strategy considerations

Keep the following points in mind when creating a customer level strategy:

You can either use a customer level strategy or invoice level strategy, but not both. After the Customer Level Strategy flag is turned-on in the eCredit Admin module (Subscriber Details screen), you can only create customer level strategies for all customers.
You cannot automatically switch from an invoice level strategy to a customer level strategy. Doing this requires help from Cortera's Professional Services team to clean-up existing action items and open invoices, and reload all open invoices after completing the strategy definition.
Promise and Dispute events within a customer level strategy are still associated with an invoice. You can create promise or disputes from a customer's Invoice list screen, but not from a customer's Collection Activity screen.
The Collection Activity screen for a selected customer displays action items for the customer, but does not reference any invoices.
Champion/challenger functionality is not currently available for customer level strategies.
When defining a segment ruleset for assigning a customer level strategy, it is recommended that you use customer attributes instead of invoice attributes to define strategy assignment rules.