Council Tax Recovery For A Local Authority

The Local Authority data, consisting of all the customers who were behind with their council tax, was given to Curved Air and cleaned, deduplicated and split into 'reminders' and 'final notices'. Council tax reminders were sent out by IVR (voice messages) to each batch of records with a tailored message to suit, over a three month period.

The customers were invited to press 1 on their telephone to pay the outstanding debt, press 2 to set up a direct debit, or press 3 if the customer had already paid in the last few days.

Full analysis was provided to the Local Authority, both as an overview and as each call data record, including customers who had already paid, customers who set up a DD, customers who transferred to the payment centre, durations of calls, times, dates and other information to satisfy the audit commission. Customers who were 'engaged' or 'did not answer' were automatically retried 3 times at different intervals.

If a call was answered by voice mail or an answering machine, a different voice message was played, stating the LA would try to contact the customer again the following day.

The outbound campaign was managed to suit the inbound agent availability so the LA would not miss a call.

The LA was able to contact 78% of the customers within a few days, 30% of the total customers transferred through to pay some of their council tax debt, making the service far more time efficient and cost-saving than traditional methods like letters, while improving the authority's carbon footprint substantially.