Experimenting With Alternative Overdue Process Templates

The system allows you to determine the efficacy of proposed overdue process templates using a small subset of customers before implementing the templates on the entire customer base. We use the term "champion / challenger" to reference this functionality.

We'll use an example to explain. Let's assume your prevailing overdue process template for residential customers starts with a "gentle reminder" letter followed 10 days later by a letter threatening collection agency referral if payment is not received. You may want to experiment with the impact of a change to this template. For example, you may want to change the "gentle reminder" to something more assertive and follow this up 5 days later with an even sterner warning. You can use the "champion / challenger" functionality to perform this experiment.

The following points describe how to implement "champion / challenger" functionality:

• Set up a "challenger" overdue process template for each template that you want to experiment with.
• Insert a new Champion/Challenger option on the Overdue Processing Feature Configuration for every champion template. Each option's value defines:
  • the "champion" overdue process template code
  • the "challenger" overdue process template code
  • the percentage of the time the system should use the "challenger" template
• Keep in mind that you can only experiment with one challenger template per champion template. For example, let's assume you have two prevailing overdue process templates - one for residential customers and another for commercial customers. You can experiment with different challenger templates for the residential and commercial templates. However, you cannot experiment with two different challenger templates for the residential champion template (i.e., a champion template can have 0 or 1 challenger template).

After setting up the above, your implementation's Overdue Rule Plug-In may include logic to use the challenger template X% of the time rather than the champion template. The sample plug-in provided in the base product, called C1-CB-CR-RAT, includes this logic.

If you are using the Oracle Utilities Analytics product, you can configure analytic zones in innumerable ways to compare the efficacy of the champion versus the challenger. For example,

• You can set up a graph to show the average duration of each type of process.
• You can set up a graph to show the average dollars that were successfully collected.
• You can set up a dimensional scorecard to show how each template performed in different regions (or customer classes or ...).
• Etc (the list is limited by your imagination)