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176 Attend Online Workshop With Absa

ABSA have held the most recent quarterly Workshop with Debt Counsellors.

During the online workshop, there were 176 connections (some with multiple staff members) and most of the senior members of ABSA’s Distressed Consumer Solutions department were on hand to chat directly with Debt Counsellors.

Presentations & Portal Enhancments

After the usual online meeting technical stuff was sorted out, the team began a series of presentations about various topics such as: 

Portal enhancements, info about queries and updates, the upcoming portal training and a Q&A session.

Debt Counsellors were repeatedly encouraged to make use of the ABSA Portal. They do have a call centre and shared some stats of how busy the call centre is but highlighted that many items handled via the call centre can be sorted out by the Debt Counsellor without any delay via the portal.

This includes things like balances, account statuses, drawing paid up letters and settlements.

On the 3rd of March ABSA updated the portal and have added some extra functions and columns etc (see below) to make life easier for Debt Counsellors.

ABSA will be sending out an invite to all DCs to register on the system and get training if they have not already done so. This will go out next week. Debt Counsellors will be helped on a first come first served basis and ABSA are normally able to handle onboarding between 5 and 8 Debt Counselling practices a week (depending on the size of the organisation and which staff members need access to what functionality). 

Q&A

After the presentations ended there was some time to go around the table and introduce all the team members (some previous teram members have left and some responsibilities ahve shifted slightly) and there was also a robust question and answer session.

Hot topics included DCRS and non DCRS proposals and counters, dealing with terminations and reinstatements, replacement of CLI and the off limits topic of Induplum (because this is at court, it was suggested that it not be covered in the workshop).

All in all, it was a great success and helpful to all who attended. It shows how beneficial it is for credit providers to pull back the curtain and give Debt Counsellors more direct access to their teams and how this fosters good exchanges of ideas and suggestions.