Why ‘Call us 9-5’ is your biggest collections failure
How restrictive hours cost you money, frustrate customers, and fail Consumer Duty
The digital brick wall
It is 10pm on a Sunday.
Your customer, perhaps a shift worker or a busy parent who has finally got the kids to sleep, finds a quiet moment to deal with their finances. They are stressed about an overdue bill, but they have the funds and the intent to resolve it right now.
They visit your website, navigate to the 'help' page, and are met with a digital brick wall:
"To discuss your account, please call us between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday."
In that single moment, you have not only missed a payment; you have actively blocked it.
This 9-5 model is a holdover from a different era. It is a process built entirely around your office hours and your staffing rotas, rather than your customers' reality.
This is not just a minor inconvenience; it is a costly strategic mistake. The call-only model is your single biggest point of failure, directly increasing your cost-to-collect, suppressing your recovery rates, and creating avoidable regulatory risk.
Commercial failure: you can't collect when you're closed
The most straightforward argument against the 9-5 model is financial. You are missing your best opportunities to get paid.
1. The ‘moment of intent’ is 24/7
People worry about money and manage their finances outside of work hours. In fact, the '9-5' window, when your customers are likely working, is precisely when they are least available to take a sensitive financial call.
Their ‘moment of intent’ to resolve debt is often on the commute home, late at night, or on a Saturday morning. Digital services offer that flexibility. Your "Closed" sign acts as a direct barrier to payment during these peak times.
2. Serving the phone-averse majority
A huge, solvent portion of your customer base will simply never call you. They manage their entire lives via apps and web portals. To this group of people, a call-only model says, ‘We are not open for your business.’
The result: You don't just delay the payment; often, you lose it. The customer who was ready to pay at 10pm moves on to other priorities. The intent is lost, and your net recovery rate takes a hit.
Operational failure: paying more to be less effective
If missing payments wasn't bad enough, the 9-5 model is also incredibly inefficient, driving up your cost-to-collect. Here’s why:
You create an inefficient surge of calls
By forcing 100% of your customer interactions into a limited window, you create artificial surges – usually at 9am and lunchtime. This guarantees long queues and high abandonment rates. You are forced to over-staff to manage a bottleneck that your own process created.
You waste your most expensive and skilled resource
Without a self-serve alternative, your agents are stuck handling basic, transactional calls:
"I just want to make a payment."
"What's my balance?"
"I can't pay it all today."
The result: Your cost-to-collect skyrockets. These are tasks a customer self-serve portal can handle for pennies. Instead, you are paying highly trained agents to act as payment processors, while your complex, vulnerable customers wait in a queue.
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The compliance gap: Why ‘9-5’ is a Consumer Duty risk
Beyond the balance sheet, a 9-5 model is increasingly indefensible to regulators looking for "sludge" practices and avoidable harm.
It creates anxiety and stress
Customers are already stressed about debt. Forcing them to hunt for privacy during work hours for a high-stakes call isn't just inconvenient, it is overwhelming. Digital engagement reduces performance anxiety and lets customers control the pace.
It's a Consumer Duty red flag
The FCA's Consumer Duty demands that firms enable customers to pursue their financial objectives and act to avoid foreseeable harm.
A 9-5 brick wall creates foreseeable harm. It actively prevents the customer from resolving their debt when they are able to do so. It puts the lender's schedule above the customer's well-being.
The solution: From 'office hours' to 'always on'
The fix is simple and profound: stop restricting, start enabling. A successful digital collections strategy is about unburdening the customer. It uses a self-serve portal as the primary, 24/7 front door.
- The trigger: An automated, empathetic SMS or email is sent: "We're here to help. You can manage your account options here, 24/7."
- The action: The customer clicks the link at 10pm.
- The resolution: They securely log in, view their options, and build a sustainable payment plan.
- The outcome: The account is back on track. No agent was involved. Your cost was fractions of a penny. The customer felt in control.
Conclusion: Remove the barriers.
Ideally, your call centre should not be the front door for everyone.
It should be the Intensive Care Unit – a place reserved for your highly-skilled agents to help the most complex or difficult cases that need specialist attention.
It is time to stop being a blocker and start being an enabler. The ROI is simply too big to ignore.
