High-Tech Tactics From Debt Collectors Catch Debtors Off Guard

If you’re struggling to make payments, paying off debt may no longer be your only concern. Debt collectors have adopted modern, high-tech tactics to increase their success like voicemails that do not ring or wooing avatars on your smartphone.

New strategies by collection agencies mean that the days of long, laborious efforts like manual phone calls or annoying letters have evolved into tactics that dodge regulation while saving debt collectors time.

Company managers are at odds with shocked debtors angry consumer advocates for these new practices. These managers argue that their jobs are necessary and these tactics improve their success while benefiting consumers.

Here are a few of the new tactics:

Ringless Voicemail Drops

True to the nature of debt collectors who’ve long struggled with regulations that limit the interactions they have with customers, this new software allows debt collectors to send out thousands of voicemails without a single ring.

The reason these messages do not come across as voicemails comes from the technique used to send them. They are sent directly to a phone company’s server as messages. The server then passes them on as voicemails.

Attorney Billy Howard disagrees with companies like Stratics Networks who argue that no laws have been violated. Howard, an attorney for The Consumer Protection Firm in Tampa Florida, claims that “They’re trying to torture the language of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.” He sees the belief from companies like this that auto-dialed collections laws don’t apply to these types of claiming that “if it doesn’t ring, it’s not a call.”

Debt collectors feel that these types of unannounced voicemails are nearly too efficient because consumers enjoy being able to respond to “DirectDrops” ringless messages when they can, notes senior sales VP for voicemail technology company VoApps Inc., Paul Gies.

While these voicemail deliveries tend to overwhelm call centers, Gies notes that they’ve taken measures by adding “pacing features” to help ease the burden on them.

Avatars

Tom Gillespie Jr., chief executive of BeGuided Inc., is one of the many collectors using avatars in the form of animated cartoon characters like Zoey who speak multiple languages and use credit scores to weigh payment options are more successful at collecting debt from borrowers’.

He points out that people are three times more likely to pay back debt when dealing with a “warm, friendly” avatar over traditional methods. These avatars show up in email inboxes and once clicked, guide borrowers through the repayment process while smooth-talking them along the way.

“In the last year we’ve sent out millions of emails,” Gillespie points out, “We’ve had zero consumer pushback.” Access Receivables Management Inc., is Gillespie collections company with the slogan, “nice people collect more.” It is another attempt by Gillespie to help remove the negative reputation of the industry.

Speech Analytics

Rather than being lost in a deluge of cursing, advanced language-recognition programs evaluate language and recognizes emotions used in conversations between collection agents and debtors. Then software from CallMiner Inc. creates prompts to redirect conversations

Collection agents are monitored through the collection process when using the speech-analytics system. This system portrays various colored boxes for supervisors to use when watching their agents. In a typical conversation where the agent may be merely reminding a debtor of their rights, the screen would be green on the call center computer monitor.

“A supervisor can consider barging in and taking over the call, or whispering into the agent’s side of the call,” when the box turns red, explains Scott Kendrick, CallMiner marketing vice president. This usually happens when someone uses profanity or the agent struggles with a response.

CallMiner’s Eureka program can also evaluate the tone of an agent during a call and provide more successful approaches. The program tracks results and ranks them among other collectors to stimulate competition.

Gamification

Debt collection agencies don’t have the best reputation. So it’s not surprising that some agencies have turned to games for inspiration to increase performance. Debtors don’t realize that they are simply tokens in a competition for prizes.

FidoTrack LLC uses video game like tactics to have agents compete against each other to improve performance. “You figure a lot of people who are actually collecting are maybe on the other end of the phone in their personal life,” states FidoTrack founder and president Brett Brosseau, “It sucks to ask people for money.”

These agents compete against each other for pizza parties, televisions, even dinners with the boss, all for rapidly recovering money from debtors in a structure that tries to make collection enjoyable, at least for the agents. The only one not in on the game are the debtors.

Brosseau points out that the 19 percent increase in revenue and decrease in complains from consumer to support the idea that these tactics are effective.

Skip Tracing, Spoofing and Scrubbing

Skip tracing is a practice where debt collectors search through databases looking for borrowers. They track debtors down through social media websites to collect debt. There is even a Texas agency that connects social security numbers to social media accounts causing concern.

Another strategy known as spoofing is the practice of masking a call’s caller-ID number. The call comes across to debtors as a local number, making it more likely that it will be answered. A federal watchdog agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, wants to propose to ban the practice.

If you want to complain to the CFPB, you can do so if you feel you’ve been treated poorly. You also have to right to sue, but doing so may open you up to a process known as scrubbing.

With scrubbing, agencies like WebRecon LLC look through databases of debtors and deletes those who are known as “banana peels” or litigious debtors. These people are seen as unnecessary risks to avoid.