A key to profitability and success in the legal collection industry is limiting the amount of time spent on accounts that are not likely to pay. It's not a productive use of your staff's time or your client's court cost money on suits involving individuals who are not in a financial position to pay. The more you can avoid wasting your scarcest resources on these situations the more resources you will have available to expend on opportunities with the highest potential rate of return.
The key is identifying which accounts are worthy or you staff's time and your client's money. Fortunately, there are more and more data services available that provide attorney firms with this type of information. Litigation Scores or Collection Scores, details about who is in Foreclosure or who is about to default on a car loan or is or isn't current on their trade lines. All of this data tells a story that can help you identify if you should pursue legal action on an account or not. However, combing through all of this data can be a time consuming process on its own.
So how can you leverage technology to assist in identifying these situations? With all of the different data services available manually reviewing data results sent from vendors can be extremely time consuming and not always accurate. What really needs to happen is that when specific vendor (scrub) information is imported into your collection database from these data services your software should be able to identify what data has been returned and systematically schedule the next appropriate action immediately.
BSI has started an initiative to provide smart integrated interfaces that can interrogate the vendor data returned and schedule the next logical task or action. We have begun introducing this feature with some of the Experian Collection products. For instance, the Cogent rules engine is capable of identifying when specific trigger results are returned in Experian Triggers product without the need for a manual review. Based on the trigger result the account can then be routed to the appropriate team or individual to perform the next logical action.
In this competitive debt collection climate every efficiency gain is visible in both your bottom line and your client's measurement of your performance. Leveraging vendor data services and automating the review of data results will have a positive impact on both.
To find our more on this topic please contact us to schedule a demo.