Voice CRM specialist Qire has appointed Ciara Harte as business development manager to further extend the use of Qire’s interactive voice messaging (IVM) technology within the debt collection market.

Qire’s debt recovery solutions help agencies to improve collection rates and increase average payments on unpaid bills and arrears, and can play a key role in enabling agencies to reduce business risk.

Debt collection agencies will benefit from Harte’s industry experience and knowledge of the debt collection and credit management sectors.  Harte will be working closely with agencies to integrate IVM technology into existing debt recovery systems, for a cost-effective means of achieving more direct contact with customers.

According to Harte: “Rising unemployment and increasing levels of business debt have meant that some debt recovery agencies are at significant risk – exposed to bad debt and financial loss.  It’s essential that they take the right steps to improve collection rates and to engage more with their customers, if they are to ride out these difficult economic times. 

“IVM technology offers a low-cost way of achieving more direct contact with customers in arrears, automating the process of making telephone calls to named contacts and verifying their identity before connecting them to a live agent, optimising call centre and agent productivity and allowing them to handle more calls.”

Qire’s voice CRM solution is already being used by a number of debt collection agencies for a more integrated and comprehensive approach to credit management.

In the case of Severn Trent, Qire’s IVM technology has successfully recovered more than £3m in arrears in the first year of use, with average payments 30 percent higher, offering notably higher collection rates over dialler and postal campaigns.