Stop losing promises to pay: a workspace for Kenyan collections teams

Anyone who has supervised a collections floor knows how a shift ends. There's a pile of promises. "I'll pay tomorrow when the salary comes in." "I can do half on Friday." "Just send me the paybill again." If those lines only live in a call note, somebody's personal WhatsApp or somebody's memory, the next morning starts with guesswork.

And the accounts you want first in tomorrow's queue are exactly the ones whose promises fall due today, or have already been broken.

That's why we built CadenceApp at Beacon Creek. It's one workspace for calling, collections, messages and the operations around them. An agent logs the promise to pay while still on the call, and later the app marks it kept, partly kept or broken depending on the payments recorded against the account.

Two things up front, though. We aren't telling you how much you'll recover, because we can't know that. And none of this replaces the rules that come with your licence.

Where do promises go missing?

A spreadsheet is fine for a list of balances in a small team. Where it struggles is the life of a promise: how much, which date, which agent took it, and whether the money ever arrived. Those details are the first to slip when shifts change over or a supervisor is covering someone on leave.

Lenders, SACCOs, microfinance institutions, collection agencies and BPOs all run into some form of this, even though the regulation differs from one to the next. What we're trying to do is give those teams a single place for calling, the debtor book, messages and reporting, so they aren't juggling a separate dialer, a spreadsheet and a chat app.

How does the promise tracker work?

Every promise carries a status, which is one of upcoming, due today, kept, partly kept, broken or cancelled. The app works that status out from the payments recorded on the account, which means your team can go after the broken and due-today promises first.

Say you're planning the morning. You'd open the debtor book and filter it by account status, aging bucket, assigned agent, client or portfolio, and promise state. Narrow it to broken promises in one portfolio, for instance, and add that result to a dialer campaign. When an agent opens a debtor's profile, the promises, payment plans and settlement offers are all there together.

Agents then work in the dialer workspace. They can pick a campaign, their own accounts or the team queue, and after each call is logged the next account comes up on its own.

While the shift runs, you'd keep the live wallboard up. It shows calls, contact rate, promises, promise-kept rate, amount collected and callbacks due. There's also a recovery ROI view that sets what you recovered against what the subscription costs. All of these figures come from your own payments and call outcomes.

They're for managing the work. Please don't lift a sample rate into your marketing, and a promise-kept rate this month isn't a guarantee of next month's cash.

Can my agents call from their own phones?

Yes, that's one of three options. Dialer campaigns can run on manual, power or predictive dial methods, and an agent can place the call through an office PBX or GSM gateway with a desktop softphone like MicroSIP, through a cloud voice provider if your organisation has one set up, or from their own mobile, which opens the phone's dialer.

If an agent types a Kenyan number as 07… or 01…, it gets converted to +254 before dialling. When the call is handed over to the agent's phone, CadenceApp remembers it and opens a "Log this call" panel, so the outcome still gets recorded.

Inbound works too. A returned call can go to the agent assigned to that account, to an inbound team or to any free agent, and whoever answers sees the debtor's details on screen. A missed call from a known debtor turns into a callback. As supervisor, you follow calls, promises and amounts collected on the wallboard.

SMS, WhatsApp and email templates are part of the workspace, and once those channels are connected for your organisation, replies come into a team inbox. Please don't send bulk messages to people who haven't agreed to be contacted. We've written a separate piece, Calling hours, wording and third parties, on collection conduct under Kenyan rules, including the CBK Digital Credit Providers Regulations, 2022 for the institutions they apply to.

If you'd like to try it, start a 30-day free trial, no card needed. Or book a demo through the contact page if you'd rather see it first.

How do we get our accounts in?

Start the trial at cadenceapp.co.ke/en/register. There's a counter in the app showing how many days you have left.

You can pick your industry at this point if you want, and its starter message templates and pipeline stages will be ready to load. Then go to the data import page, which has CSV templates for debtors and contacts, and bring your accounts in.

Next you allocate them to agents. Every allocation move is recorded, and when someone goes on leave you can reassign their work. From there your agents call, log promises and send reminders, and you use the wallboard and recovery views to see what's due. Those views are there to run the floor, not to give you a target to announce that you can't defend.

What does it cost?

CadenceApp is priced per agent in Kenya shillings. Annual billing gives you two months free, and prices exclude VAT. We're not putting seat prices in this post, because the figures on our different public pages haven't all matched up yet. The live pricing page is the one to check, or ask us during a demo.

Be careful how you talk about results

From your own payments, CadenceApp can show you which promises were kept. That's a record. It isn't grounds to tell a board, a client or a borrower that some recovery figure is assured. If you ever publish a case study, only use figures the client has agreed to share, and keep demo screens labelled DEMO.

Questions supervisors ask us

Will CadenceApp guarantee our recoveries? No, and we'd be worried about anyone who said otherwise. It gives you a place to log promises and to see from your own payments whether they were kept. That's not a forecast.

So agents really can use their own phones? They can. The mobile option opens the phone's dialer and the "Log this call" panel comes up so the outcome isn't lost. An office PBX or GSM gateway, or a cloud voice provider, work as well.

How do we get going? Register for the 30-day trial, no card needed. Import your accounts from CSV, allocate them, and your team can start logging calls and promises.

Where are your current prices? Only on the live pricing page. We've left seat prices out of this article on purpose.

Start your 30-day free trial at cadenceapp.co.ke/en/register. No card is needed.