For years, collections and customer service have been viewed as opposing forces: one focused on repayment, the other on support. As the financial landscape evolves, it is becoming increasingly clear that the strongest outcomes come from bringing these two worlds together.
Customer-centric collections is a structured, empathy-led approach that helps customers navigate financial difficulty while enabling organisations to achieve sustainable repayment outcomes.
When applied effectively, it significantly increases customer engagement, enhances affordability conversations, and reduces friction in what can be a sensitive interaction. It’s essential that agents are upskilled and refreshed on a regular basis to provide a consistent approach.
In this blog, I’ll take a look at how insight, training, and lived experience come together to create a truly customer-centric collections approach.
Starting with insight: Understanding the present
Before training needs are identified, organisations must understand what is truly happening within their collections environment. Insight is the foundation of any effective behavioural shift.
This requires:
- reviewing customer journeys and processes
- analysing performance and call outcomes
- listening to a representative sample of calls
- comparing current practice with industry best practice
- identifying behavioural, tonal and structural gaps.
Because no two organisations are the same, insight-led design ensures training addresses real challenges and aligns with the organisation’s true needs.
What customer-centric collections looks like
With the right insight, training can be designed to embed behaviours that are both empathetic and outcome focused. Customer-centric collections combines:
- Empathy – understanding the customer’s circumstances
- Assertiveness – communicating clearly and confidently
- Emotional Intelligence – recognising cues, adapting your approach, and responding appropriately
- Vulnerability awareness and safe disclosure – building trust and psychological safety so customers feel confident sharing personal challenges
- Structure – following a logical, consistent call flow
- Affordability – ensuring solutions are sustainable
Customer-centricity and vulnerability
A customer-centric approach also strengthens an organisation’s ability to identify and manage vulnerability. Empathetically driven and assertive conversations help customers feel comfortable sharing personal circumstances, enabling agents to recognise indicators earlier and respond appropriately.
Importantly, when vulnerability is identified, it does not automatically mean a customer is unable to manage their finances. With the right balance of empathy, clarity and assertive guidance, customers often feel more empowered and able to make informed, sustainable decisions.
Strong collections skills ensure those conversations lead to fair, balanced outcomes that support both the customer and the organisation.
The importance of effective facilitation
This is where lived experience becomes essential, bridging theory with the realities of day-to-day customer contact.
Collections training is only impactful when delivered with credibility and relevance. When companies embark on their training journeys, they should understand that collections teams value real examples, practical demonstrations and techniques that reflect genuine customer interactions, not just words on a PowerPoint!
Effective facilitation involves:
- demonstrating realistic conversations
- explaining why certain behaviours drive better outcomes
- responding credibly to questions and scenarios
- fostering engagement and discussion
- avoiding over-reliance on slides or scripts.
Without this, even well-designed content may fail to resonate with learners.
The role of lived experience
Facilitators with hands-on collections experience bring authenticity that enhances training. Their familiarity with real customer situations allows them to demonstrate techniques confidently, anticipate challenges and address delegates’ practical concerns.
This strengthens engagement, builds trust and ensures that training resonates on a practical level, not just a theoretical one.
Beyond the classroom: Operational and strategic context
Customer-centric training is most effective when supported by broader expertise across operations, strategy, systems and regulation. When training aligns with organisational objectives, it reinforces:
- contact strategies
- segmentation and prioritisation
- system workflows
- regulatory expectations
- QA frameworks
- customer journey design.
This integration transforms training from a standalone event into a meaningful driver of long-term improvement.
A changing regulatory environment
The collections industry today is defined by a strong focus on vulnerability, fair treatment and sustainable good outcomes. This requires a blend of emotional intelligence, structure, clarity and regulatory awareness.
Customer-centric collections align closely with this framework, supporting both compliance and performance.
Conclusion: Collections as a skilled profession
Effective collections require far more than simple negotiation. It demands empathy, structure, resilience, emotional intelligence and the confidence to guide customers through challenging circumstances.
When organisations combine insight-driven design, skilled facilitation and customer-centric behaviours, they create collections environments where customers feel understood and supported, agents feel confident and capable, outcomes are sustainable, performance improves, and regulatory expectations are met.
Customer-centric collections is not a compromise; it is the foundation of modern, sustainable collections practice.
How we can help
Organisations don’t need to navigate this alone. Many benefit from an independent view of their current collections environment, from call listening and skills analysis to identifying gaps, strengthening processes and supporting training delivery.
With the right expertise behind them, teams can embed these behaviours quickly and confidently, creating lasting change for customers and the organisation.
Take a look at our helpful resources below or contact us directly to discuss your needs.
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About the author
Scott Penman
Lead Consultant
Scott has over 25 years’ experience supporting financial services organisations to improve their collections and recoveries operations, strategy and customer outcomes. He has led complex migrations, troubleshooting, optimisation and transformation programmes across Debt Manager systems, bringing together both deep technical expertise and operational insight.
Alongside his consulting work, Scott is an experienced collections trainer and facilitator, delivering customer-centric, vulnerability-aware training to frontline agents and leadership teams. His approach bridges theory and real-world delivery, bringing behavioural change to life through practical scenarios, lived experience, and outcome-focused coaching. His work focuses on strengthening performance while ensuring customers are treated fairly, empathetically and in line with evolving regulatory expectations.