Kick your outsourced collections machine into overdrive

If your financial institution works with a third-party vendor for your collections efforts, you know how important it is to ensure your partners perform at an optimal level. The vetting and on-boarding process alone can take months, so the “set it and forget it” mentality could be detrimental to the overall performance of your collections operation. To ensure your outsourced partner performs at a high level, it’s wise to understand their company procedures and establish agreed upon benchmarks to measure their performance.

To help kick your collections machine into overdrive, we’ve compiled a list of questions you can ask your collections partner.

1. Institute a performance card

In order to set proper expectations and set all vested parties up for success, it’s important to establish a measurement tool. A performance card creates a foundation for your financial institution and your vendor to fully understand how the collections program is being measured. Maybe you measure the success of the program on the number of monthly calls made by the collections team. Or perhaps your idea of a successful program is the number of early or mid-stage payments collected. Whatever the metric, it should be clearly stated (in writing) so there’s little room for miscommunicationwhen it comes to your collections strategy, goals, and overall program performance.

continue reading »