easily measured in the collection industry is the recovery percentage . How much you have turned over verses how much the agency has collected . How is the Agency doing in collecting the accounts you have given them ? What can they tell you about how they are doing it ? You want complete transparency .
Does your Agency have a web based platform that is available 24 / 7 that can provide you with detailed information ? Can you easily obtain overall gross and net recovery rates ? Can you view down to the individual account level all the way up to summary information on your total portfolio , over any period of time you require ?
Additionally , is the platform easy to access and navigate for you to get this objective information ? The web platform should be easy to use and provide you with all the information you need to evaluate and track your Agency ’ s performance .
You should also be able to query your data by account , date , range of dates , etc . Can you review all collector notes and communications ? Do you have the ability to communicate with the collector if you have questions on an account ? Can you export the data into any format you want such as Excel or PDF so that you can perform further analysis or use the data for in-house reporting ?
Issues that you need to know ?
• What is the quality of the paper that you have been sending to your Agency , how old is the debt and is the customer still open and operating ? It ’ s almost impossible for an Agency to collect from a company that is out of business or in bankruptcy so strong consideration needs to be placed on the accounts being sent to you Agency if they are remotely collectable .
• For the accounts that are collectable , for the total time you
‘‘ How they treat your accounts is critical . How does the Agency represent your brand ? If they are too aggressive they may be making it impossible for you to ever do business with a customer again . Every once in a while an account may suffer a business downturn , so you don ’ t want to let an infrequent problem eliminate your chance of ever doing business with the customer again .’’
have been doing business with the Agency , and by year , month , and account , what is their gross and net recovery returns ? This is an important number as it allows you to compare their results to published national averages as well as industry averages .
• Where does your Agency stand with your accounts today ? You need a status report that lets you know how they are doing right now . What does your current portfolio look like , how much has been collected so far , in total , and by account . To the extent status codes and descriptors are used , what is the status of each account and what future activity is anticipated .
• You need a payment history that shows the time to recovery from turnover to your receiving a check . Can you compute average recovery time so that you can do some cash forecasting based on the age of your portfolio ?
• For auditing purposes , you need a track record of remittances sent to remittances received . You need to be able to verify that all payments the Agency has sent you have been received and deposited .
• All of the information hould be exportable and sortable in to multiple formats . Can you sort a report by field from high to low , from low to high , or alphabetically , or by range of dates or by status code or by a combination of fields ?
• You might also want your Agencies to provide any of their reports based on a specific composition of your accounts , such as by period of time the Agency has had the claim , by customer type , or by age past due at the time of placement . Any breakdown for a subset of accounts should be possible as long as you can extract accounts from the portfolio by some defined characteristic and then prepare a specific report just from the extracted accounts . Do they have ad-hoc query capability ?
• Can you drill down to the individual account level and see in detail , how any individual account is being handled ? Are the collector ’ s notes available and easy to understand ? Can you use the account level report to easily access the collector either by email or phone ?
• Can you listen to recording of collectors calls on your files ? This is just some of the objective information you need to properly evaluate an Agency . If they cannot give you most of it , you might want to look for somebody tha can .
32 MAL 16 / 17 ISSUE