My Collection Agency Experience

by Valerie Lancaster
(Neely, Mississippi, United States)

The Collection Agency that I worked with was (name withheld) in Florida. I must say that my overall experience was not negative, but it also was not positive. Some of the employees of this company were positive, helpful, and professional, while others were rude, disrespectful, and very negative.

A merchant hires a collection agency to collect a debt that they are unable to collect from a customer. Often, the customer has been a good customer and may be again. The customer associates the behavior of the collection agency with the merchant, and the customer will impute any bad behavior by the collection agency to the merchant.

In this case, at least one of the employees of the collection agency was rude to the customers. Some of them probably were rude to the agency employees as well, but some of them were not. In this case, there were many customers who paid their debt over time. Although their financial situation later improved, they subsequently took their business elsewhere.

When contacted later, these former customers advised that they were treated poorly by the collection agency--poorly in this case meaning disrespectfully, i.e.--called perpetrators of fraud, or deadbeats, etc. These customers felt that since the business hired the collection agency, the business was responsible for how they were treated, and therefore, they did not want any further dealings with the business.

The collection agency which was utilized in this process was always professional when the merchant was dealing with them; their prices were reasonable, and the employees that met with the merchant were professional and appeared to be well-trained.

Undoubtedly, most of the employees were nice people just doing their jobs, however, at least one wasn't. It can be deduced that at some point, some of the customers must have contacted a supervisor at the collection agency to complain.

One must wonder if the supervisor looked into this complaint or just passed it off as part of collection agency "blues". In any event, it appears that more training and complaint resolution of some type could have resolved this issue. As it happened, the merchant decided to hire someone to handle their own debt collection.

In this way, the merchant insured that the customers were treated respectfully. Only when a customer was blatantly not going to pay was the case then "sold" to a different collection agency.

In this manner, the merchant felt he was treating his customers more respectfully.