Providing excellent service to your clients is the secret to success. Collection agencies offer a service to its clients that entail many touches of the account by both the infirmary and the agency. What’s most important are providing a reasonable return on the accounts that are placed and the interactions with your customer in resolving issues that come up.

The 3 critical pieces of the puzzle are software systems, your consumer service and collections staff, and reporting. Today’s software systems can dump many of the day-to-day interchange that once happened between the customer and the agency. Each client that the collection agency serves has distinct wants, while there is some commonality to all collections activities.

Medical collections represent nearly half of all collection agency business in the USA. Making full use of technology gives you the ability to manage collection accounts in ways which permit many functions to be automated. Letters are automatically sent and accounts can move from one collection phase to the following primarily based on rules that your management outlines. Once your software rules are established, the accounts mechanically move through the collection phases primarily based on events. Those events may include payments received, status changes (including insurance billing), insolvency filings, or attorney assignments. Collector queues can be determined daily based on these status changes.

Account status changes frequently are reported directly to the customer hospital. The hospital’s patient account personnel in the past would call the agency to report payments received and supply new info that has been supplied by the patient or the “responsible party”. These activities are time intensive. They require that info to be transcribed and then entered into the collections software database. With web portals, the client can now enter that information directly from the Web, so getting rid of much of the time and potential for errors in information entry. Clients wish to make these updates thru the web portal. The web access is a significant edge over the old way of doing things.

Software services now supply the ability to perform most every task automatically. Events occur systematically and on time. Collectors can focus on chatting with the debtors and supervisors can manage their folk. Reports for the customer can be issued on the online portal, so the customer can view monthly activity and performance when it is convenient , any time day or night.

Some think the decrease in the daily calls from your client will have a negative impact on the relationship. What is vital to the customer is the return on the accounts placed and the ease of handling the day-to-day activities on the accounts. The customer will still call you, but it’ll be for the “exceptions from the norm”. Savings in staff time will be realized on both ends of the relationship, and mistakes will be reduced.

A well trained and inspired staff will be the final deciding factor on precisely how well you perform for your customer. This is especially true given the dollar amounts and sensitive nature that surrounds medical collections.

Good software technology and well designed workflows will make your staff finish way out in front the competition!

Writer Rodney MacKenzie is an executive with Collect Tech Solutions, supplier of Wincollect collection software .