More Bad Debt Collection Letters

Hopefully your letter will yield some results. You should receive the payment or at least a phone call to make payment arrangements. If, however, another week goes by without a check or a phone call, the debtor reaches a new plateau. If a consumer is at the 45-day mark and you have not yet been paid, it is time to up the results a bit. After all, in 2 weeks, they will be at the sixty days past due mark. This time, write a past due debt collection letter and send it via certified mail with a return receipt, evidence that it was received.

(Address Element) (Date)

Account #_____________________________

Balance Due: $____________

Minimum Payment Due: $___________

Dear Mr. John Doe:
Your account is seriously past due! You have not sent us the previous month's payment and, in a short time, another monthly payment will be due. While we appreciate your business, we find your failure to communicate with us disquieting. Please be advised that we cannot consider extending additional credit to you until you have paid off your past-due balance. Please send us your check in the amount of $________ today, or call our office to make payment arrangements. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Creditor Company (or name of business)
(Address)
(Phone)

Ways to Improve Collections

Tips on how to collect debt:

OUTDATED BELIEF #4: Your Best Agents Should Call Your Toughest Customers.
Theoretically it seems logical to assign your best agents to call the toughest accounts, whether for collections or cross-sell. But, if this assumption is wrong, it means your best agents are being wasted on accounts where higher skills (and their associated higher salaries) have little impact.

NEW THINKING: Research with sales agents has shown that agents' skill levels, indeed, have a great impact when talking to receptive customers. Skilled agents can, in these cases, sell more in less time. But the research also showed that highly skilled agents delivered no advantage when selling to the most difficult prospects. The company's counterintuitive finding showed that the hardest prospects were difficult to approach under any conditions. If the call center had followed its intuition without testing the theory, it would have degraded its overall agent performance. This finding translates to your skilled collection agents and delinquent customers and means that your general agent pool will be equally as effective with your toughest accounts as your skilled agents.

BOTTOM LINE: If you are putting skilled agents against your most difficult accounts, you should conduct an unbiased test to find out if this strategy is really paying off.

OUTDATED BELIEF #5: Local Strategy Control is Best.
With multiple call centers, strategy is often left up to each center because there is a belief that each local floor operation and download list is somehow unique. What's more, you may allow strategy to be handled locally because a group of call records is downloaded to one specific dialer and called only from that dialer. There are many problems with this outdated approach: Agents across multiple sites may not be fully utilized, campaigns may not be implemented consistently, and the individual customers are vulnerable to severe weather and other downtime risks.

NEW THINKING: New-generation list management technologies remove these limitations by holding a centralized global campaign and dynamically directing call records from any download to any networked dialer. The result is increased productivity as the workload is leveled across agent resources and as strategies are executed consistently and without interruption.

BOTTOM LINE: The collections operation is more productive with a centralized list management technology keeping all call strategies on track in a single or multiple centers. Mounting consumer debt around the world is a challenge for every company. In today's complex and increasingly risky business world, it is necessary to make every step of the collections process as effective and efficient as possible. Often this requires updating long-held beliefs with the addition of new solutions that solve today's biggest collection problems. Today these five outdated practices are being overcome by companies who've found that intelligent predictive technologies can measurably elevate their collections efforts to a new, significantly higher level of productivity.

About the Author
Lois Brown is Vice President of Marketing at Austin Logistics Incorporated, headquartered in Austin, Texas. She oversees brand positioning, marketing communications, and new product definition for the companies' expanding line of predictive analytic and optimization solutions.

Washington Collection Agency Laws

Want to learn more about state by state debt recovery? What about debt recovery in Washington? Following is some important information on Washington debt collection laws including: Washington Statutes, Washington Judgments, Washington Garnishments, Washington Interest Rates, Washington Bad Check Laws and Washington Collection Agency Requirements.

INTEREST RATE
Legal: 12%
Judgment: 12%

STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS (IN YEARS)
Open Acct.: 3
Written Contract: 6
Domestic Judgment: 10
Foreign Judgment: 10

BAD CHECK LAWS (CIVIL PENALTY)
Lesser of check amount or 12% interest, collection costs up to $40. If taken to court, reasonable attorney's fees, 3 x value, or up to $300. Now have 6 years to enforce a bad check.

GENERAL GARNISHMENT EXEMPTIONS
Greater of 75% or $64 wk. (40 x state min. hourly wage).

COLLECTION AGENCY BOND & LICENSE
Bond: $6000 general, $4000 specialty
License: Yes
Fee:
$100 - Investigation
$100 - Original
$100 - Renewable
$50 - Branch Office
Exemption for out-of-state collectors: Contact state authorities. Out-of-state agencies may qualify for lesser licensing fees. Out-of-state collectors are no longer required to have resident office and instate trust accounts if they don't have instate client. Bond is not required if held in home state.

Experian Website

According to the company website, Experian employs more than 4,500 people in North America. Experian North America's annual sales are more than $1.2 billion. Experian's North America databases contain more than 65 terabytes (65 trillion bytes) of data. Experian maintains credit information on approximately 215 million U.S. consumers and more than 15 million U.S. businesses. Experian maintains demographic information on approximately 215 million consumers in 110 million living units across the United States. Experian provides address information for more than 20 billion promotional mail pieces to more than 100 million households every year. The Experian credit bureau is a subsidiary of GUS plc, a UK-based holding company that includes retail, property investment, finance and information services businesses.

Medical and Dental Bill Collecting

Medical and dental billing collection advice: Whether you have just opened your practice or you are at the helm of a large and successful practice, all medical and dental practicioners have patients that don’t pay. There are many avenues available to you for your debt collection needs including self serve automated letter writing services, discounted services for multiple files or volume collections and more traditional means of tracking down bad debtors and getting your money. You should look for a service with experience in the medical and dental billing field - a company that is used to dealing with insurance companies, but who, in the end, has experience with all methods of debt collection.

Rules on PreEmployment Screening

The law restricts a credit reporting agency from including a credit report that contains a consumer’s medical information for employment without first obtaining the consumer’s consent. By law, a prospective employer must have a consumer’s written permission before getting a copy of their credit report. A credit reporting agency that includes a preemployment screening report for purposes that contains items of information that are matters of public record and are likely to have an adverse effect upon a consumer’s ability to obtain employment must:

* At the time such information is reported to a prospective employer, notify the consumer of the fact that public record information is being reported by the consumer reporting agency, together with the name and address of the person to whom such information is being reported;

* Maintain strict procedures designed to insure that whenever public record information which is likely to have an adverse effect on a consumer's ability to obtain employment is reported, it is complete and up-to-date. Items relating to arrests, indictments, convictions, suits, tax liens, and outstanding judgments are considered up-to-date if the current public record status of the item at the time of the report is reported.