Top 5 Automation Tips Using Your Collection Solutions

Julie Melton

Your collection solutions are essential to your operations. But are you using them to their full capacity? You’re past the point of wanting a few bells and whistles – you need real functionality that touches on every aspect of your business.

Fortunately, collections technology has come a long way in recent years. Collection professionals now have many tools at their disposal – vital tools that automate day to day tasks, extend your reach to more of your audience, measure return on investment, and help you collect more debt.  Here we’ve compiled a top-five list of automation tips to help you gauge how well your current collection solutions are working for you, and guide you toward greater success.

#5: Aim for Dialer Optimization

Manual calling is no longer an option for organizations striving for efficiency. Today’s sophisticated dialers and contact management solutions can increase contact rates by 200 to 300 percent over older telecommunication methods.

With the most advanced outbound predictive dialing solutions, your organization can expect to:

• improve automation of routine communication tasks
• improve capacity and collector productivity
• significantly reduce operating costs, including telephony expenses, payment processing costs, personnel expenses, and capital expenditures on technology

As with any technology, some solutions are better than others. Look for those that go beyond the basic predictive dialer and offer a comprehensive package that includes interactive voice response (IVR), voice messaging, call recording, SMS/text messaging, and an automated payment center. Most important, choose a solution that works hand in hand with your core collections software.

#4: Add Payment Integration to Your Toolbox

Once you’ve made contact with your audience, your next goal is to steer them toward a payment arrangement. By integrating the payment process into your contact strategies, you’ll convert those contacts into collected dollars with greater ease.

Your solution should provide account holders with multiple payment channels and online tools to direct funds into the bank both faster and at a lower cost. For complete automation of the payment process, you will want the following functionality:

• Fully integrated, real-time ACH and Credit Card payments within your core collection software
• A customizable web portal that allows account owners to securely sign on to pay in full, negotiate a settlement or arrange a payment plan 24/7/365
• Secure Online Payment Processing with a “Virtual Terminal” to accept card payments, card pre-auths, and eChecks or to provide SMS/EMails

A comprehensive, real-time automated payment management solution gives your collectors more opportunities to make high-quality contacts and your account holders more options to settle their accounts – all while saving you money each month.

#3: Customize Your Workflow Engine for Strategy Automation

Tailoring operational strategies to specific accounts and circumstances is a key aspect of effective ARM operations. Your ARM software solution should support strategy customization by applying a powerful workflow engine that can direct your system to take actions based on real-time events.

With the ideal workflow engine, the definition of events and actions is flexible and can be adjusted to create business logic that enacts best practices developed by ARM agencies in response to specific business requirements.  When your system operates in real time, events can be registered and responded to right as they happen, rather than as part of an after-hours nightly batch process.

Here are a few examples of what the best real-time workflow engines can help you achieve, all of which can be enacted immediately, no matter what time of day:

• Build campaigns on demand. Your dialer can take specific actions, such as creating a queue to call every account with certain characteristics, in a specific priority order.
• Automatically exclude accounts. Your software can direct the dialer to make changes to a work queue.
• Process result codes in real time. After the dialer carries out an action, it can automatically update the account record in your system.
• Dynamically produce agent hit screens. The dialer can pass information to collectors in real time based on successfully reaching a debtor.

Simply put, an ideal real-time, event-driven workflow engine automates, validates, and implements business policies based on the practices that have made your agency successful.

#2: Automate Scoring and Data Management

Having accurate data at your fingertips is crucial to making decisions and prioritizing your collection efforts. You want your solution to provide on-demand data analysis services that estimate which accounts are most likely to pay, as well as provide insights to guide choices about which collector and approach to use when collecting on accounts.

By applying scoring and data automation to your operations, your collections team will find it much easier to:

• Find bad data, including data entry mistakes and errors provided by a client
• Segment higher risk accounts, by searching and monitoring bankruptcy and deceased files
• Catch fraud by identifying incorrect addresses and phone numbers, as well as SSN (credit reporting)
• Verify property ownership
• Standardize mailing addresses
• Fix bad addresses and reduce mail returns
• Fix bad phones and increase dialing efficiency
• Locate new phones and addresses

With data services tools incorporated into your core collections software, you’ll be better equipped to forecast payment probabilities and identify which accounts are most likely to generate revenue. Plus, you’ll optimize the collections process by determining the best collectors to work accounts, and which accounts are not worth working at all.

#1: Accept Nothing Less than Seamless Integration

There are a number of technology providers out there who offer a variety of stand-alone solutions, all of which may be fully functional, yet require a complicated, piecemeal approach when it comes to making them work together in harmony.

One of the best ways to become a more efficient and successful operation is to implement a complete built-in solution that provides advanced logic, a streamlined workflow, and all the tools you need to automate the debt collection process. An intelligent, expandable solution will conform to your organization’s operational strategy, rather than the other way around.

Julie A. Melton serves as Columbia Ultimate‘s Director of Marketing, and has been with the company since 2007.  She received a Bachelor of Science in Journalism from the University of Oregon and a Master of Business Administration from George Fox University. Additionally, Melton was recently elected as an internal affiliate division representative to the Council of Delegates for ACA International and serves on the California Association of Collectors Vendor Committee.