One of the contact center sector ‘bright spots’, if you can call it that, in today’s diminished economy is collections. As more people lose their jobs the number of delinquent accounts rises, requiring firms who need this money to survive and in doing so avoid having their employees lose theirs to step up their efforts obtain promises to pay and payments from debtors.

 

For the companies that are owed money, collections, also known as accounts receivable management (ARM) becomes a very competitive zero-sum game for limited resources. Bob Kelly vice president, PerformanceEdge (News - Alert) group, Aspect, points out that customers who are delinquent on one set of accounts are likely to be late on others. The creditor who is most able to obtain the greatest percentage of the money owed wins, while others may get little or nothing.

 

“Creditors have very small window to obtain whatever dollars that debtors can pay committed to them rather than to someone else,” says Kelly. “There is only one chance to get that commitment for a full or if not a partial payment and that means having the agents with the skills to obtain that, handling objections well on the way to achieve that goal.”

 

To manage your workforce and avoid painful layoffs you may be looking at redeploying your contact center workforce from inbound customer care or order entry, or outbound customer acquisition or lead generation to ARM (News - Alert). This will require screening and training candidate agents for this task.

 

Collections requires a balance between patience and tenacity, of understanding and resilience and above all a goal-oriented mindset. While collections/ARM may be out of the comfort zones especially for those staff who have handled customer service, most individuals are practical enough in this economy to realize that having work is better than none.

 

That is where performance management tools come in. The applications obtain the metrics in near-realtime to help supervisors gauge effectiveness, and if necessary provide coaching or eLearning to agents to boost results.

 

The best metrics for collections are: promises to pay for right party connect i.e. directly speaking with a debtor or co-debtor not whoever picks up the phone, actual dollars collected per promises to pay, and quality management scorecards that measure how agents handle objections.

 

Also to bolster performance, consider deploying workforce management on your collections contact centers and teams. The tool’s schedule adherence function lets you determine, via performance management total actual collection time and comparative employee productivity based on the other metrics per hours worked.

 

“Performance management enables collections to track who is most successful at getting the promise and get the quality of that promise: do they get the dollars collected,” says Kelly.