A Peek Inside the Collection Industry/Vancouver/Our Four Suitcases

A Peek Inside

the

Collection Industry

You don't go to school to become a Bill Collector. There are no classes called "Locating the Elusive" or "Sucking up Insults 101". The industry does recruit via job fairs, looking to hire students that are graduating high school as well as university. You may be surprised to find that many collectors are people holding university degrees as well as people with years of experience in the finance industry.

When large financial institutions make massive cuts to their internal collections department then agencies do tend to get a large influx of resumes. Collections is almost a recession proof industry and a person that has strong organizational skills, works well under pressure and has the ability to allow insults to roll off of them like water off of a duck's back has a chance to make a very profitable career for themselves.

Over twenty years ago, employment ads for collection agencies looked like they were shopping for used car salesmen. It was uncommon to see a woman sitting with a phone in one hand, cigarette dangling from the other, peering through the haze of smoke that permeated the office. It was a male dominated industry, the old boy's club ruled the roost.

The job is not for just anyone. It takes a special kind of grit to do the job. You need to have a strong drive to help people and the ability to learn the techniques to assist them with financial advice and refinancing. You have to be willing to take a large amount of verbal abuse, remain calm and be persistent all while following every piece of agency regulating government legislation for every province and state as well as each client's rules.

The payoff for your skill set can run anywhere from $20,000. to $100,000.+/year, depending on the type of portfolio that you manage, the commission structure and your ability to negotiate for your own value.

There are rules that govern the industry and the collectors.

You have to be able to learn these rules and pass the tests with a minimum grade of 80% or higher. The rules are in place to protect the consumer. After several years, where agencies were allowed to run roughshod over people, legislation was put in place to protect people from less than professional collection methods.

Collectors that were not flexible enough to make the change from their hostile approach to a professional and helpful style were laid to waste, no longer wanted by the industry that had trained them to be pushy and overly persistent.

Clients now had rules about how they wanted their defaulting customers to be treated. It became possible to file complaints and sue for unacceptable practices and harassment. Agencies were letting go people that failed to adhere to the new strict rules in order to avoid losing clients and having to fight a lawsuit.

Agencies that failed to make the necessary changes lost clients. Some agencies closed or were shut down. Those that remained got tough on themselves and instituted re-training programs for their staff. The rules kept coming and client's expectations regarding the performance of the agency were no longer based solely on how much money the agency could collect.

Clients wanted agencies to motivate, assist and retain defaulting customers. Their criteria for which agencies got their business now included penalties for complaint calls, report cards on job performance and statistical reports on calls made versus contact. They pitted agency against agency and allotted their outstanding accounts based on quarterly reviews.

Agencies met the higher expectations by bringing in new technology to help locate current information on people, by utilizing automated messaging and call systems. Hiring employees with the skills to meet the client's needs and the ability to deal with and diffuse complaints became the standard.

Collectors had daily call targets, daily quotas and job performance reviews that expected those targets to be met all while being answerable to the government agencies and the ever changing and stricter rules meted out by clients.

Heaped on top of these expectations was new legislation to govern people's rights to protection of their personal information. Collectors had to be more cautious than ever before to maintain a professional demeanor and tread the thin line between harassment and dunning, which is a demand for payment.

One man's dun is another man's perception of overboard pushiness. Ongoing training and coaching techniques on what to say, how to say it and what tone to use became a daily event at some agencies. Calls were now being monitored by quality control personnel. Failure to properly govern your collection practices lead to warnings, poor report cards, retraining or dismissal.

I was the first female collector hired by my company. I spent twenty years moving up through the ranks, bypassing the majority of the boy's club on the way. I became a regional office manager, moved and took on a supervisor role and then walked away from the industry.

I have held every role other than vice-president/president in the industry. I have done collections, skip tracing, managed collection teams, trained, handled legal collections, run a branch office, overseen the client service department, done cold calling and client retention and went on the road doing sales for a couple of years.

I helped scores of people find ways to deal with moderate to severe financial difficulties and I helped companies find the right approach to dealing with crippling accounts receivable. The atmosphere of friendly competition and rivalry at an agency is thrilling. It is much like being on the floor of the stock exchange, at times.

I've made big bank in the industry but it can eat away at you. It's not easy to hear some stories, knowing they are true, and still have to try to get someone interested in finding a financial solution to their problems.

Being a career collector is much like being a doctor in that people will pull you aside to whisper their problems into your ear and ask for free help and advice.

Good collectors have had to take years of abuse in part due to bad collection practices in the past and because of poorly trained agents. I did what I could to make the industry better over my 20+ years by helping people and companies save their homes and businesses, refinance their bad debt and find ways to deal with their creditors, avoid bankruptcy and even save money along the way.

I've trained some wonderful people on how to collect ethically and I helped grow my first employer's company. They helped me too, by believing that a woman could be just as aggressive, hard-working, professional and deserving as any man in the collection industry.

I have retired from the industry. I miss the sheer energy and excitement from competing that my job offered.

I highly recommend that any graduating student without an idea on which profession to enter at least spend some time in the collection industry.

There is a lot of transferable knowledge that you will learn in any position and you will be groomed to not just collect but on how to sell people on the hardest product ever, financial responsibility.