Turkasset: Bringing Customer-Centricity to Debt Collection

In December 2014, in preparation for the year-end board presentation, Hilmi Guvenal (PMD 1993), shareholder and CEO of Turkasset, and Ilker Yoney, COO, sat down to discuss Turkasset’s five- and ten-year strategic plans. Since taking leadership of the company in 2009, Guvenal had supervised Turkasset’s growth from a single office of 20 people into a nationwide firm with over 300 employees at six different branches. By 2014, Turkasset had made a name for itself as a data-driven, customer-friendly collection agency. Nonetheless, the Turkasset board felt the company had managed to establish itself a customer-centric niche in the Turkish AMC market. However, Turkasset’s overall collection rates on acquired portfolios remained largely on a par with those of the competition. So, board members had yet to confirm whether the culture of prioritizing the customer had led to increased shareholder value.
The case describes the elements that help put together a customer-centric philosophy at Turkasset, an NPL management and collection agency in Turkey. The case describes the evolution the company went through in face of the pro-consumer era in financial markets and how it established itself a competitive angle through a customer-focus. The case provides the context for the students to identify the design elements underlying Turkasset’s operational design and helps them explore the link between customer focus in a collections business and employee training and empowerment, as well as analytics and IT. The case challenges the students to deliberate whether the amount collected through a soft-collections method over time justifies the investments in customer-centricity.