If you’ve made the decision to hire a collection agency to simplify your receivables so you can concentrate on other tasks, you may want to know how to choose the right one among thousands of possibilities. There are some signs that show you a collection agency is truly professional and therefore preferable to its competitors. Following are a few of them.
The first thing you need to ask when trying to hire collection agencies is whether or not they charge an upfront fee. Most collection agencies charge a percentage of the money they recover. This gives them more incentive to be successful, so there’s really no reason to employ a collection agency that takes your money up front. It frees up more of your cash flow to pay a percentage fee.
The second thing you need to ask potential collection agencies is whether or not they belong to one of the professional collection associations. These two organizations are the Commercial Law League of America and the American Collectors Association.
For example, both organizations require perfectly professional conduct from their members. Not only do they conform to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, they are committed to training courses for members to teach the latest collection techniques.
The next question for a collection agency you want to hire is whether or not they will allow you to access your accounts online. Even though you’re delegating collections to them, you want to be able to check your files to see how things are going at any time. A truly professional agency will understand this need and take care of it for you rather than making you rely on monthly reports.
You also want to pick an agency that uses private investigators or does investigations themselves with skip trace software. (A skip trace is a search for a person based on their previous known addresses.) Collections efforts can’t be successful when you can’t locate the debtor. This is a practice that all good collection agencies follow these days so make sure the one you choose does as well.
Agencies that incorporate private investigative services into their offerings are also preferable. One of the most difficult parts of the collections job is tracking down missing debtors. An agency that incorporates investigations into the services they offer you will cost less and be more efficient than one who has to outsource their investigations or one who doesn’t do investigations at all.
Finally, make sure your collection agency has staff working outside of standard business hours in order to maximize your collections efforts. If you have collections all over the country it’s better to hire an agency with offices nationwide in order to deal with disparate time zones. Even if all of your collections are local, make sure the collection agency has some people who work early and some who work late, because collections calls outside of the 9-5 time frame are usually more successful.
Related posts:
You must log in to post a comment.