How do you get collectors and agents to actually use new tools and processes?

The short answer

In our view agents use a tool when two things are true: it helps them do the job they are judged and paid on, and it doesn’t slow them down in the middle of a shift. In our experience most rollouts get the first week right. Training goes well, people are curious and the dashboard looks busy. In our experience the hard part comes months later, when the launch is forgotten and the tool is one more screen between the agent and the next call.

So show each agent what the tool does for them, keep their day as familiar as you can, give them an early win, make sure it works where they work, and have managers keep asking about it long after launch.

Why agents stop using new tools

• They can’t see what it does for them. Fred Davis’s research on why people accept or reject technology at work (MIS Quarterly, 1989) developed measures of two beliefs: whether a system is useful, and whether it is easy to use. In two studies with a total of 152 users, how useful people thought a system was had a stronger link with how much they used it than how easy they found it. The analysis also suggested that ease of use may be one cause of a tool seeming useful.
• It gets in the way of the number. In our conversations with sales and collection floor leaders, a common complaint is agents who focus only on hitting their targets and see a new tool as time taken away from them. In our view they are being rational: if the tool doesn’t help with the number, it costs them.
• The enthusiasm fades. Cheri Speier and Viswanath Venkatesh surveyed 454 salespeople at two firms that had brought in sales force automation tools (Journal of Marketing, 2002). Straight after training, the salespeople saw the technology positively. Six months after it went live, it had been widely rejected, and absenteeism and voluntary turnover had risen significantly. Salespeople with a stronger commitment to their profession became more negative in their job-related perceptions as their experience with the technology grew.
• It doesn’t work where they work. In our conversations, floor leaders have described field agents who dropped a follow-up tool because it barely worked on their phones in poor signal, and agents who stopped opening a coaching app after the first weeks.

What keeps a tool in use

1. Show each agent what it does for them. Not what it does for the business, but for their own results, their commission or their day. In our view, if you can’t say that in a sentence, the agents won’t be able to either.
2. Keep the screen and the day familiar. In our view the fewer new clicks, screens and logins a tool adds, the better its chances. Put it inside the system agents already use where you can.
3. Give them a quick win. Pick a first use where the tool helps visibly in the first week: a call note written for them, a payment taken faster, a lead they would have missed.
4. Make sure it works where they work. Test it on the floor, on the real headsets, phones and connections, at the busiest hour, before the launch.
5. Cut what you ask them to record. In our view every extra field an agent has to fill in costs calls. Ask only for what someone will use, and show them what it is used for.
6. Have managers hold the line. In our experience a tool lasts when team leads use it in huddles and one-to-ones, and keep asking about it long after launch. In our experience, when managers stop asking, agents stop using it.
7. Ask the doubters. In our experience, agents who have worked the phones longest are often the most doubtful. They are also often the ones others follow, and their objections can point at a real problem.
8. Measure use and results separately. A tool that is opened every day may still not change anything. Check whether results moved, against a control group where you can. How to bring AI onto the floor without hurting results.

A new way of assigning accounts is different

Some changes ask nothing new of agents at all. A change in which accounts or leads each agent gets leaves the screen, the dialer and the script as they are, so in our experience the questions agents ask are about fairness and pay rather than about learning a tool. Those are covered on their own pages: How to get collectors to accept a new way of assigning accounts and How to get sales agents to accept a new lead allocation system.

Where agent matching fits

Agent matching is a different kind of change from a new tool. BestPair sends each account to the eligible collector who has done best with accounts like it, from the floor’s own call and payment history, inside the rules and workload limits the agency sets, and measures the result against a control group. People make every call.

Sources

• Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and User Acceptance of Information Technology: Fred D. Davis, MIS Quarterly, 1989.
• The Hidden Minefields in the Adoption of Sales Force Automation Technologies: Cheri Speier and Viswanath Venkatesh, Journal of Marketing, 2002.