Collectors who stay in this business long enough usually end up hearing every objection, stall, and question in the book. And, over time, they can develop the appropriate responses to each of those situations. But that takes time. How can an agency help newer collectors — those whose inexperienced ears have yet to hear all the different stories and explanations that their more experienced colleagues have dealt with — provide the same measured responses?
In this episode of Training Bytes with Mary Shores, Mary shares her ideas to provide collection agencies with the proper framework to address every type of conversation and question that a consumer might ask during a collection call. In a lot of cases, Mary suggests, agencies should start with the outcome in mind.
“When you’re figuring out your objection responses, it’s good to ask yourself the question, ‘What is the outcome I’m looking for?’ ” Mary says. “So, whether it’s resolving a dispute, or whether you want to get the person to pay the account, or maybe they’re threatening a lawsuit … then you look at your policy. And there’s always a path between the policy and what you want. And then what you’re going to do is you’re going to reverse engineer the best way for the consumer to respond to that objection, to create the path to that agreement that you’re looking for.”
Answering questions with a question may not always be the optimal way to address a situation, but in many collection calls, collectors have to work at peeling away the layers of what the consumer is saying to get to the root-cause of their issue, Mary said. She remembers a situation where an individual came into her agency to pay a bill and kept asking the collector for the documentation that he needed. The collector, not quite understanding what the consumer was asking for, kept telling him that she could not provide that kind of documentation. Mary, who happened to be listening from another room, realized what the consumer wanted and was able to solve the problem. What did the consumer want? “A receipt,” Mary says.