I received an interesting email recently from a fellow collection practitioner who was just recently assigned to a new collection/ strategy department. The reason I find her email interesting is the fact that this will give me the opportunity to give my thoughts and assists in fortifying a collection department particularly on skip tracing capability. The email sender is asking for my advice regarding collection best practices particularly on skip tracing techniques. Below is part of her emails, portion of which were edited to protect details and identities.
“Good afternoon! My name is XXXXX and I work for a new…. company. I'm currently responsible for the MIS and Strategy departments. Reading some articles on the internet I found your e-mail address and I would like to know if you can help me on getting better practices and strategies for collection and, mainly, for skip tracing process. I was given the responsibility to build a new and effective procedure on locating debtor process and really I have no idea on how to start it. I would be very thankful on getting to talk better about it. ….(follow-up email) ..I'm really glad to have assistance from someone who is an expert on this area. We've been on the market for only XX months and the managers didn't have previous experience on collection. I worked for XX years on another collection company but I also don't have a large experience on defining best practices and strategies for collection or skip tracing. I also do not have a draft or previous manual of our processes. What I can tell you is that, nowadays, our strategies are defined by aging and amount to be collected, as the following: low aging - high balance, low aging - low balance, high aging - high balance, high aging - low balance.”
“For our portfolios I was thinking on this:
• work all the portfolio to identify the type of accounts we have;
• segment the portfolio by: aging, amount to be collected, debtor location, branch of activity, date of foundation of the company, company incoming, legal processes (in case they have it), partners information;
• apply some strategies based on the information above (it would be great if you could help me on building them);
• for the located debtors, collect normally;
• for non-located debtors, build a strategy for skip tracing:
-try to call debtor on 2 different hours;
-if we identify that the phone is not valid, work on fortifying the information - look for more information about phone numbers and address;
It would be great if we could build together a flow for this process in order to make it more effective and clear. I also would like to work with messaging campaigns, text messages for cell phones and online negotiation / trading. Once again, thank you for all the help. Certainly we will keep in touch.“Best regards,--“
Next week, I will try to provide some assistance on the said subject matter.
For comments, rejoinders and questions related to credit & collection, send email to elimtingco@yahoo.com.