Non paying customers create a major financial burden on the telecommunication companies. Telecom is a highly competitive industry and without a proper accounts receivables strategy, past-due accounts can restrict the ability of a telecom provider to expand business, provide quality service existing customers and create a crunch required to upgrade systems to a new technology to stay competitive.
The billing department of the telecom companies is always under lot of pressure because not only customers are constantly unhappy about the mandatory charges that telecom and mobile phone providers are supposed to add on base price of a plan by law, moreover if a customer uses services that exceed beyond the service plan, it results in a lot of over-charges that customers often dispute and refuse to pay. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently conducted a survey and found that over one-third telecom customers were behind payments due to billing disagreements or personal financial issues.
Hiring a professional debt collection agency will relieve the accounting staff from the headaches of collecting money from past-due accounts. A good collection agency is able to serve both national and regional telecom providers.
Benefits of engaging a Debt Collection Agency:
1. Agencies are able to do advance skip tracing to locate the debtor and engage with him, professionally and diplomatically.
2. Check if the person has filed for bankruptcy or has deceased, then recommend that the case should be closed without wasting any more resources.
3. Report the debt to Credit Bureaus if you want.
4. Collect the debt by following the FDCPA guidelines prescribed by the federal government and do a preemptive scrub for “litigious” customers thereby greatly reducing the number of lawsuits that a telecom provider get dragged into.
5. Involvement of a Collection Agency conveys a very strong message to the customer and they are more likely to settle, verses when the employees of a telecom provider were trying to collect money under their own company’s name.
Check this: Cost of hiring a collection agency
Getting better collection rates from your agency:
1. Transfer the accounts early and automatically to your collection agency. Older an account gets, it becomes harder to settle.
2. During the collection process customers often ask for the contractual agreement (soft/hard copy) and copy of bills. Those should be provided proactively.
3. Sign a Settled-In-Full agreement with your collection agency, which authorizes them to settle the case for a slightly less money in some cases.
If you need a collections agency to recover money from past due accounts: Contact us