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Tax season is underway—and so should your customer engagement strategy to recoup delinquent funds. New polls found that 79% of taxpayers surveyed believe they’ll get some sort of refund this year with 27% of them predicting it will be larger than last year, and those refunds are important to budgeting plans for a majority of consumers.
So for companies with customers in delinquency, this is the ideal time to start strategically engaging with them: 47% of Americans reported earmarking their refunds to pay off their debt and with an even higher 59% of millennials specifically. Is your business ready to engage these consumers who are ready to repay with their tax refund?
More Consumers File Taxes Online—Your Business Should Engage Them Digitally, Too
With consumers already planning on using their refunds to address those bills they’ve fallen behind on, businesses should reach them faster through their preferred channel—studies show that 69% of consumers prefer receiving payment reminders through email versus phone calls—which can lead to a more than 10% increase in payments when contacting them first through their preferred method.
Surveys find that 73% of people worldwide turn to online banking at least once a month, but that number jumps even higher when it comes to filing taxes: 93.8% of individual tax returns were filed electronically in 2023 —which is one of the top six reasons consumers do their taxes online in the first place—so make it convenient for them to engage with you by reaching them with digital communication where they are already handling their finances.
Remember: you won’t know exactly when your delinquent customers will get their tax returns, so consistent communication (within compliance regulations) is key to staying top of mind, especially considering 28% of consumers fall into debt simply by forgetting to pay their bill. Don’t let your past-due customers forget they can use their refund to pay off debt!
Leverage Machine Learning to Increase Engagement Without Adding Headcount
One of the best ways to stay top of mind to secure repayments with tax refunds is to reach your customers through the right channel at the right time with the right message. We’ve already seen that reaching customers through their preferred channel can increase repayment rates, but mass blast emails and generic SMS campaigns can be ignored just as easily as call-and-collect methods. An intelligent, multi-channel outreach strategy is the key.
Going beyond basic segmentation, machine learning and artificial intelligence-driven technology helps engage with customers at the right time through the right channels—and Retain by TrueML Products delivers a proven strategy powered by our patented machine learning decision engine informed by engagement data from millions of customers. Retain’s machine learning engine assesses a multitude of customer interaction variables, from your message content all the way through engagement data, and provides dynamic performance improvements to your operations—no tedious manual fine-tuning necessary.
By leveraging advanced SaaS solutions like Retain, businesses can skip the hassle of hiring seasonal help to take advantage of the tax refund-to-repayment opportunities. There are only so many phone calls and manual digital communications that full-time employees (FTEs) can make within a given day (especially considering inconvenient time restrictions on calling), and that’s before putting any emphasis on tax season outreach.
Taking a digital-first delivery approach with Retain for consumer communications has actually shown to reduce the number of required FTEs by up to 75% for customer outreach, plus 4x increased efficiency for the FTEs on staff.
Get Your Delinquent Account Outreach Strategy Ready for Tax Season
Consumers are already planning on using tax refunds to pay off debt—your customers are no exception. Be there to engage them when they’re ready with consistent communication in a format they prefer.