#5433. Carrots or sticks in debt collection services? A voice metrics and text analysis of debt collection calls

August 2026publication date
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Journal’s subject area:
Strategy and Management;
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Abstract:
Purpose: Although phone calls are widely used by debt collection services to persuade delinquent customers to repay, few financial services studies have analyzed the unstructured voice and text data to investigate how debt collection call strategies drive customers to repay. Moreover, extant research opens the “black box” mainly through psychological theories without hard behavioral data of customers. The purpose of our study is to address this research gap. Design/methodology/approach: The authors randomly sampled 3,204 debt collection calls from a large consumer finance company in East Asia. To rule out alternative explanations for the findings, such as consumers previous experience of being persuaded by debt collectors or repeated calls, the authors selected calls made to delinquent customers who had not been delinquent before and were being called by the company for the first time. The authors transformed the unstructured voice and textual data into structured data through automatic speech recognition (ASR), voice mining, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning analyses.
Keywords:
Debt collection calls; Financial services; Service interaction; Survival analysis; Underlying mechanism; Vocal emotion

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