In the business of third party collections, time is our
finite resource. If we had 60 days a
month, or staff that worked 16 hours a day, we could conquer the world and
satisfy even the most demanding client.
However, collection agents have this odd desire to go home, spend time
with their families, and sleep now and then.
When an agency needs to set up a call schedule, they often
get obsessed with results and lose track of the law of diminishing returns on
their staff. If you want your collection
agents to come to work and stay until 7pm each night, you will only retain
employees that are desperate for work, or have low standards for their
employer.
On the other hand, if you want to hire and retain the best
staff, you want to set out a schedule that works for your valued employees, but
still covers the call times necessary.
The work-life balance is a tricky thing in our business.
Where Is The Money?
Really, in our business it’s about collecting 80% of your
revenue in 20% of your time – the goal is to maximize the vast amount of human
effort that goes into collections. It
boils down to right party contacts and conversion of those right party contacts
to collections.
Outbound calls can be controlled by the agency, but inbound
is not something that can be controlled – consumers will call in whenever it is
convenient for them. And at different
times of the day, the consumers (statistically) will be more disposed towards
payment vs. disputing the account. I’ve
worked at agencies with mandatory Saturdays, and I’ll tell you from personal experience, it’s got a much
lower conversion to collection rate at 9:00 am on a Saturday morning versus
4:30 pm on a Monday.
Building A Schedule
When I worked at a call centre that did consumer collections
across the US, the phones would ring until 11:00 at night from the west coast,
but having the staff stay that late was simply not going to work. However, we did build a reasonable schedule –
we broke the collection team into four groups, and each group alternated coming
in one day a week at 12:00 am until 9:00 pm.
The staff were not horribly inconvenienced, and we were able to offer
9:00 am to 9:00 pm Monday to Thursday.
For the type of business we were servicing, it made sense.
There was a science to the scheduling too – we could
literally map out when calls were received and payments were taken, and then
break it down to a science of what the average staff member generated in
revenue, per person and per hour. The
larger competing agency down the street kept their staff at the office until
1:00 in the morning, and we cut off the call times when it became cost
prohibitive to keep the staff in the office.
As a side benefit, by building a reasonable schedule, guess
where the best and brightest from the competition came looking for work when we
advertised positions?
The Shocking Idea Of
Being Flexible
In an office with a predictive dialer, you need to have
regimented schedules, in order to work in synchronicity with the machine. However, I’ve never been a fan of predictive
dialing, and prefer to run a manually assigned system of collections – it’s far
more effective and liquidates a higher amount for the creditor.
Now, in third party collections, it’s common to have a late
night to try to reach those people not home between 9:00 and 5:00 local time,
and field calls from the western time zones.
The question is – how late do you work, and how you do you work it out
with the staff?
Here’s a novel concept – give the staff control over their
schedule. By all means, plan a late
night to 6:00, 7:00 or even 9:00 if the business warrants it, but let the
collectors choose which night to work, and let them change it from week to
week, if necessary. You can even balance
it out with an early day where they can leave at 3:00 pm or even noon once a
week.
Now most of the collection managers are pulling away from me
at this point, thinking my suggestion is utterly crazy. “We can’t run an agency like that! We’ll miss all the payments! Managing the staff will become
difficult! People will take advantage of
a flexible schedule!”.
For those doubters, go look at your HR records, specifically
absenteeism.
Missed Opportunities
If you recall, we started this article with the idea that
time is money. A collection agent earns
a daily wage, based on an hourly rate or monthly salary – that amount might be
anywhere between $80 and $300 a day.
Typically, they will make a commission amount in addition to this, but
let’s just stick with the base cost. Of course, they are expected to generate
double, triple, or quadruple their salary in revenue so the collection agency
can be profitable.
If a collection agent calls in sick, the company deducts $80
to $300 a day from their salary, but loses $160 to $12000 revenue from lost
manpower. It’s a losing situation for
the agency, it’s a losing situation for the creditor (because their liquidation
will suffer), and it’s a losing situation for the staff. So obviously, you want to combat absenteeism,
because it hurts everyone.
If you establish a flexible schedule, absenteeism will be
cut dramatically – employees are happier to come to work, can set personal
appointments around their schedule, and won’t burn out. You will retain skilled staff and earn
loyalty, which reduces staff turnover (which is another cost or setback to the
agency and their clientele).
You will have half the office clear out on a Friday
afternoon, but how much money did you lose from scheduling, versus how much
money would you lose from absenteeism and staff turnover if you made those same
people work until 7:00 pm on a Friday?
Conclusion
The 1950’s-style of managing staff by watching the clock,
punching a card, and running a boiler-room call centre is dying. Milennials and progressive staff expect a
flexible work-life schedule and companies that balance it with the ultimate
goal of meeting revenue criteria and exceeding client expectations will win,
not the companies with a heavy absenteeism policy or split shifts until
midnight to squeeze an extra dime out here and there.
I’m speaking here from my personal experiences – over the
years I’ve seen great companies and poor companies’ scheduling attempts. I’m interested to hear what experiences other
folks have had in our industry, and how they deal with scheduling and
absenteeism. Thoughts?
Thanks kindly,
Blair DeMarco-Wettlaufer
Kingston Data and Credit
Cambridge, Ontario
226-946-1730
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