Collecting Debt One Manually Dialed Call at a Time

Chris Bohlin

Over the past month there has been a significant amount of attention given to a recent Wisconsin court ruling – Nelson vs. Santander Consumer USA, Inc.  While I’m not going to offer legal advice about how agencies should interpret the ruling (or discuss about the fact that calling a single consumer over 1,000 times might be a bad idea!), I did want to describe how SoundBite helps its clients find solutions for addressing the technological challenges brought forth by this ruling.

At the heart of the matter, the court ruled that calls to mobile phones must be done manually and not via any system with the capacity to make automated dials. The challenge itself is quite simple: How does an organization, charged with recovering debt from consumers, make enough “manual” phone calls to a growing mobile population to reach enough consumers to actually make any money?