Brown Bag Seminar: Empathy as a persuader in debt collection

We evaluate the impact of empathetic persuasion on debtors' willingness to start making repayments. We provided empathy-supplemented training to collectors of a large debt recovery agency in the Philippines. The clustered randomised control trial generated two groups of debtors (n=32,953), one group was approached by collectors who only received the general training on how to take debt collection calls; and the other group was approached by collectors who received the empathy-supplemented training. We find that being approached by an empathy-supplemented agent would improve the willingness to make a repayment promise. Moreover, we observe that debtors who were approached empathetically would be significantly more likely to start making their first repayment.