There are different approaches to managing collection through a collection contact center. Some are better, some less. Sometimes, the business structure of the organization, the scope of the debts, the type of customers and the age distribution of the debts will affect the choice of the work method.
In the reality of a large backlog of debts and the accumulation of a very large number of debtor customers, the tendency is to take a short process, less services and more aggressive practices, which will return the organization to a stable state in a reasonable time, and to a sustainable cash flow. As soon as we stabilize the situation, we can consider converting the process into a longer and more serviceable process, which allows us to achieve a maximum rate of customer retention and thus serve the organization in the long run.
We will present here a generic process, which uses common and typical foundations for different approaches, but it is important to emphasize that it is not an ultimate solution. However, we included in it most aspects of the collection process through a collection contact center and used it to show possible dilemmas and alternatives for customer care.
To classify the circumstances of a customer entering the collection process, four types of general key events were defined. There is no accepted professional terminology for this, but for the purpose of the discussion, we will define them as follows:
Type A event: cancellation of the customer’s payment method
Type B event: non-respect of the customer’s standing order
Type C event: technical return of the customer’s standing order
Type D event: failure to pay an invoice on time.
We will first learn about the circumstances behind each type of event and define accordingly the rules of conduct for the collector and the collection manager (or the credit and collection risk manager) in each of the collection scenarios.
NEXT: Type A event: cancellation of the customer’s payment method