Banks and other financial services providers have become increasingly sophisticated in how they manage their collections operations. As the economy erodes, for communications companies to hold their own in the battle for customers’ payment dollars, they too must maximize the performance of their collection operations.

The recently released Deloitte & Touche LLP paper, Reducing Bad Debt, provides a set of questions to help to assess whether a company has an opportunity to improve its collection function and a case study of how one company enhanced the efficiency and effectiveness of its collections operation. Reducing Bad Debt explores six important areas on which communications companies should focus to achieve collections excellence:

• Policies: A set of governing principles that guide what is and what is not allowed at critical steps in the receivable management process
• Processes: Defined procedures to turn policies into consistent actions
• Analytics: A fact base on which to help determine the appropriateness of future actions based on the effectiveness of the past one
• Organization: Clearly defined roles, responsibilities and reporting relationships that support effective operations and a continuous improvement culture
• Reporting: Appropriate information provided to the appropriate party at the appropriate point in time
• Technology: Tools that enable collection agents to do their job efficiently and effectively and managers to test and evaluate multiple approaches through champion-challenger testing

By establishing a continuous improvement culture – along with the supporting tools required to sustain it – communications companies can deliver more revenue to the bottom line.

Read the full paper attached below.