A better payment experience from reminder to resolution

Customers miss payments for different reasons. A card expires. A paycheck arrives after the bill is due. Some customers face financial hardship and need help finding a workable way forward. Each situation calls for a different conversation.

A collections approach focused solely on recovering overdue balances misses opportunities to prevent delinquency and preserve the customer relationship. Effective outreach starts earlier, understands what is preventing payment, and helps the customer take the next step.

That’s why customers are using Decagon for collections. Decagon provides an AI agent for the full payment relationship. With it, your teams can:

• Prevent missed payments altogether with proactive reminders and at-risk check-ins before the due date.
• Follow up early and with less friction, using reason-for-delay listening and payment links over SMS.
• Recover revenue while supporting customers with compliant outbound calling and hardship offers matched to each situation.

A missed payment shouldn’t define a customer. With the right approach, businesses can recover revenue today and maintain a good relationship with their customers long-term.

Built for the full customer relationship

Enterprises first brought Decagon into their contact centers to resolve customer support requests. They now use those same agents to qualify leads, onboard customers, and grow relationships. Collections is a natural extension of that foundation. An agent helping someone with a payment should understand the relationship that came before it and help preserve the relationship that follows. Unlike other vendors, Decagon has:

Models optimized for CX. More than 80% of traffic on Decagon runs through models built in-house that demonstrate empathy while being highly accurate. Chord, our low-latency speech model, is built to sound natural through the pauses and interruptions of a difficult conversation about money. 

Inbound and outbound calling with user memory. Decagon uses user memory to optimize when to contact each customer, based on when they’re most likely to pick up. It uses its own dialer for outbound calls and runs SMS and WhatsApp in tandem with voice. However, it can also work alongside your company’s dialer. 

On inbound, the agent adds capacity so calls get answered immediately instead of having customers wait in a queue. It then resolves the call by taking a payment or setting up a payment plan. Better yet, the agent makes itself available 24/7, so a borrower who calls back at 10pm can still be helped. 

Compliance and guardrails built into the product. FDCPA, TCPA, UDAAP, and Reg F are enforced natively, along with state-based rules and maximum contact caps such as Reg F's 7-in-7 limit. Calls stay inside each borrower's local calling hours, opt-outs are honored in real time, and every call and text is logged and transcribed for an audit trail. Because we work with some of the largest banks, our guardrails and compliance controls are built to satisfy the most stringent requirements.

Your team defines the workflows. Agent Operating Procedures, or AOPs, are plain-language instructions that define how a Decagon agent handles a task. Your team can specify how to explain a balance, which repayment options to offer, and when to involve a specialist. If customers repeatedly misunderstand a repayment option, your team can update the explanation, test the revised workflow, and measure whether it helps more customers complete the next step. 

Specialists with the context to help. When a customer needs additional judgment or an exception to policy, Decagon makes a warm handoff to a human, with the conversation history attached. Decagon Assist supports the representative with summaries, relevant knowledge, and recommended next steps; on voice, it even provides live transcription and guidance as the conversation unfolds. With Decagon handling initial outreach and routine payment conversations, human collectors can spend more of their time helping customers with complex situations.

Case study: Making repayment workable

One UK-based brand needed to reach customers with missed payments but their collections team had limited capacity and live-agent time was expensive.

They used Decagon to combine outbound voice outreach with flexible resolution options based on the customer’s stated hardship. Customers received an SMS payment link, while situations requiring additional judgment moved to a human agent.

This resulted in 24% higher revenue recovery, stronger promise-to-pay outcomes, and significant reduction in cost per dollar recovered. Automating outreach also allowed human collectors to focus on the cases that need their expertise.

Measure recovery, then improve what drives it

Collections performance should connect outreach to completed payments. Teams can track recovered payment volume and use conversation data alongside operational costs to evaluate recovery rates, time to payment, and cost per dollar recovered. A promise to pay is an intermediate step while the completed payment is the outcome.

Decagon’s analytics help teams understand what stands in the way. Teams can use Duet to investigate payment barriers and identify where customers drop out of the payment flow and then test changes to the agent’s wording or workflow. For one customer, Duet surfaced a recurring barrier: many people could not pay until the end of the month, when they received their paycheck. The team added a scheduled-payment option to address that gap, significantly improving revenue.

Together, a complete customer context, team-owned workflows, and actionable analytics is why enterprises choose Decagon. They can build collections into their customer experience, improve it continuously, and measure its contribution to the business. 

To learn more, reach out to your Decagon team or book a demo.