Five Insider Tips to Enhance Your Right-Party Contact Strategy (sponsored)

Five insider tips on how to enhance your right-party contact strategy*: Learn steps to take to increase hit rates, streamline procedures, avoid regulatory errors and improve your bottom line.

I often talk with collections companies that must navigate today’s changing collections environment. They struggle with the time it takes to track down the right party, how to obtain the most important right-party contact information and ways to adapt to using online databases and advanced search technologies. In a prior post on right-party contact data benchmarks, I highlighted some of these challenges.

Experience has shown me that it doesn’t need to be as hard as it seems. In fact, there are simple best-practices that can help to streamline procedures, avoid regulatory missteps and guide staff to improve results and your bottom line.

Here are five best practices and insider tips on how you can work to increase hit rates and generate added revenue during your recovery process

1: Examine your collections software

Effective collections typically require a software investment so it’s important to make sure yours is working best for your environment.

INSIDER TIP: Measure the total cost of collections software ownership with the results and make sure you have the right balance for your business.

2: Invest in data quality

Stale or less-than-the-best data can waste your time and lengthen the collections lifecycle, and it may also lead to regulatory issues.

INSIDER TIP COMPLIMENTS OF INTELLIGENT BANKING SOLUTIONS: Analyze your customers and develop profiles by which you can review collections strategies to see what is working and what is not. Then implement the appropriate changes to fix the issues.

3: Monitor your processes

Having effective collections policies and procedures in place is great. However, just because they’re in place doesn’t mean they’re always followed.

INSIDER TIP: Appoint an internal IT resource to service and monitor your collections system, and make changes as right-party compliance requirement policies change.

4: Handle disputes

Consumer disputes is an area that has come under great scrutiny by regulators in recent years, particularly the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). How you handle disputes can have a dramatic effect on your business.

INSIDER TIP: It’s incumbent on the agency to closely monitor consumer expressions of dissatisfaction, no matter how they are reported, and document every step of the resolution process.

5: Stay on top of industry trends

Technology is continuously advancing and regulations are perpetually changing, so both businesses and individuals in the industry need to keep up with the latest trends.

INSIDER TIP: Push the productivity needle by taking advantage of web training and self-guided seminars to keep your people updated with compliance and system changes.

These tips are important to follow if you want to increase recoveries. But how do you know if you are on the path to success? In our right-party contact insight guide, we go into more detail on these steps including the questions you can ask yourself to see if you’re headed in the right direction.