Developing Collection Strategies

Collect! can be molded to mimic your company policies. You may be completely familiar with collection strategies and what you want Collect! to do for you. Or, you may be just starting out and beginning to plan your account requirements and what you will do for a client.

The combinations of procedures that you can perform on an account are limitless. Each agency has its own way of doing business. Perhaps you send five standard letters to your debtors with two phone calls at specific intervals. Someone else sends two, phones once, does a review. When a payment is received, you may handle it one way and someone else another.

There are so many possibilities that this makes it difficult to show sample contact plans that suit you perfectly. The Contact Plans feature allows you to design any combination of procedures that you require to automate the scheduling of contacts and recording results. Used correctly, contact plans greatly simplify and streamline your operations.

When you can lay out the steps that you would like to see happen to a set of your client's accounts, the next step is to manually set these events up on an account. Doing this will give you the information you need to create a contact plan to automate the actions you created manually on the debtor account. Anything that you can do on a debtor, you can automate into your collection strategies or contact plans.

As you develop the steps, you are advised to keep your events focused. Try to not consider reactions when planning a contact plan. This will give you the power of handling an account from start to finish with the least operator interference. Why have an operator schedule a letter that could have been scheduled previously by the contact plan?

Contact plans can have as few as one event in them, so keep your plans simple. Then you can use the simple plans in more complicated contact plans. Try to program what you want to happen without considering future reactions.

Another useful tip is to try out your contact plan development in the Demodb database. This way you are not going to interrupt your operators while you are designing and testing a new contact plan. When you can successfully run the contact plan in your Demodb database, you can either create the exact same plan in your Masterdb database or copy and paste the contact plan from the Demodb. You can even export the contact plan from your Demodb database and import it into the Masterdb database.

The possibilities are endless. Take small steps and test along the way. You will be able to develop very complex and efficient collection strategies for your company.

See Also

- How To Design New Contact Plans
- How To Use Contact Plans
- Contact Plan Topics