This has been a whirlwind week. I’ve spent pretty much all of it hearing
about Linkedin discontinuing company product pages (and everyone is screaming
about losing their valued company recommendations), listening to lawyers argue
about what emails will be allowed under the Canada Anti-Spam Lesiglation (CASL),
and all sorts of rumblings of change in our industry. Change
can be dangerous, if companies aren’t prepared.
I worked for a collection agency at one point with only two
clients – they were big clients, to be sure, but in my first week, I asked “what
happens if one of those clients leave?”
I was assured that would never happen.
And then three weeks into my new position, the major client decided they
weren’t going to send files to collections in Canada any longer, and we had to
shut down the department – I had the unenviable role of restructuring the
company and letting some of the staff go.
Eventually the company bounced back and eventually had about 50 clients
by the time I moved on, but the recovery from that setback took years to solve.
The old adage, “don’t keep your eggs in one basket” are
absolutely correct – if you wish to be the master of your own destiny at your
company, you can’t keep your fate in the hands of a single client, telephone
provider, sales person, IT manager, or technology – you need to have failsafes
in place and diversify your company, just like you would an investment. This will protect your company from the rocky
waters of change.
In the credit and collections world, there are a number of
things I’ve seen in my years that went horribly wrong, that can be prevented…
Diversify Your
Clients
What happens when your major client representing 60%+ of
your revenue calls and tells you they are lowering your contingency rate? Not much, because they are effectively
driving your company rather than you. It
gets worse when they reduce their business, miss a month of assignments, or
change the terms under which you can collect.
It’s great when you land a major client, but for long-term stability and
prosperity, it’s just a sign you need three more major clients to balance
everything out.
In the long term, you also want to diversify across
industries. Video rentals, direct mail
order, NSF cheque collection – these all used to be reasonable verticals to be
in ten or twenty years ago, and are much smaller now because the world is
changing.
Balance Work and
Workforce
One of my early jobs as a collector involved collecting
Ministry of Attorney General files – I was given a queue of 150 files. Being the energetic young collector I was, I
called all 150 in a day. When I went to my supervisor and asked for more
files, they told me there were none, and to call those same 150 files again
tomorrow.
I’ve seen other agencies lay off hundreds of capable and experienced
staff when a client contract ends, or
there is a slump in assignments, simply because the agency manned their
portfolios to the maximum, and didn’t allow room for variation in assignments. If you tell your work force they are going
from 40 paid hours a week to 36, you are hurting the people who generate your
revenue and you count on. In our
industry, work flow can’t always be predicted, so it’s important to man to the
point the client is receiving the best service, but at the same time if
business ceases to flow there isn’t panic and reactive business decisions that
harm the company, such as changing staff levels quickly.
If You Are Renting Space, Can You Get Another Place?
The moaning and gnashing of teeth about Linkedin taking away the company recommendation feature is very loud -- on April 15th, they will no longer show product and service pages, and all the time spent building up recommendations will be lost. However, it shouldn't surprise us, because we just 'rent' space on Linkedin -- it's not ours, we don't control it. It's been great while it lasted, and Linkedin is a great tool, but if it's your only tool, again you are making one person (or company) the master of your destiny. In this specific example, getting recommendations on a variety of social media sites will protect your company from losing all that invested time, and have a place to redirect your loyal customers when Linkedin flips the switch.
Keep A Spare In The
Trunk and the Server Room
If you have your collection database crash more than once a
year, or go down for more than an hour, why are you not spending a few hundred
dollars and a little time to have a ghosted or mirrored copy of your server
sitting in the server room? If something
disastrous goes wrong, a couple of switches can be flipped and everything is
back up and running. The alternative is
to have dozens if not hundreds of collectors twiddle their thumbs while one or
two IT staff scratch their heads and fix things – the cost of that is
monstrous.
What Do You Mean The
IT Manager Went For Coffee?
If you’ve worked for a medium- or large-sized company, you’ve
probably run into this – something crucial and technical breaks down, and your
IT manager went to Tim Hortons, leaving no one to fix the problem. If this happens frequently, it might be a
sign that several things are wrong – your technical processes might not be
robust enough, you might need to get your IT Manager a company cell phone, and
you might need to engage in some cross training.
Conclusion
My point is, you need to be prepared for something to go
wrong, and have a failover plan – what would happen if you run an 800-man call
centre using a predictive dialer, and it suddenly stopped working? What happens if a major Financial Institution
awards your business to another company?
What if your Operations Manager who you rely on is suddenly hired away by
your competition? These are very real
problems that hamper companies, because they didn’t have a plan until the
problem happened.
It doesn’t mean living in fear, or being paranoid – it does
mean thinking about potential risks to your company, and trying to minimize the
bumps in the road that inevitably happen as we try to run our business.
If anyone has some examples of how they protect themselves
against disruption and risk, I’d be interested to hear it, either in a comment
below or by email at bwettlaufer@kingstondc.com
Thanks kindly,
Blair DeMarco-Wettlaufer
Kingston Data and Credit
Cambridge, Ontario
226-946-1730
No comments:
Post a Comment