Having worked for far too many years in large noisy Debt Collection Call Centres, refereeing squabbles, bickering and the occasional punch up (yes seriously), the change in Legal Collections has been quite an eye opener. For anyone who’s ever worked at a Law Firm, they will know there’s an almost library like atmosphere, heads down, working away with a mountain of thick files on their desks, open law books with an undercurrent of studied concentration. Literally everything seems to be time dependent and very important. Not quite the scratch of quills on parchment & cobwebs blowing in the candle light, but close! What still surprises me most are the multiple complexities surrounding legal work, the many variations on approach and in particular to outcome, the amount of paperwork and form filling the courts require would be a real eye opener for anyone looking at our profession. That said, great strides are being made at modernising, most recently the Secure Data Transfer system has been launched, making bulk issuing a much easier process, though it can still be a paper and time hungry road to go down.

To be honest, few things in life are straightforward, no two court hearings are the same, no two District Judges are the same and the amount of preparatory work is pretty eyewatering. at every stage of the process. However, when you think about it, if you are going to issue proceedings against a member of the public you’d better have your ducks in a row. Court Proceedings are serious and affect people in many ways so you have to do it right.

So in the dawn of positive customer outcomes, how do we make things error free, easy to understand and slicker, whilst adding more value when handling matters beset with mandatory, complicated, jargon filled, paper laden procedures?

Our old friend technology with a side helping good old fashion re-engineering and better-trained staff, that’s how! We all know manual processes can bring expensive costs and time restraints, often causing it to ‘bottleneck’ at an important stage. If your processes flow, if you’ve removed all non-value activity, if your staff completely understand their remit and buy into it positively and demonstrably, then you look to technology to add even more value.

There are a spectacular amount of products, software, services and hosted services out there to help develop your business and make it more cost effective…and more are being launched by the day. Think of something, search it, and you’re likely to find someone providing it. It’s that easy. Innovation is a growth industry wherever you are and you can take that to the bank.

Reviewing our own platform was an interesting task seeing as the IT infrastructure was so strong already but over the last few years, technology just hasn’t stood still in any medium, so making sure we are business ready is a constant challenge. That said, the access to information via, search engines, articles, testimonials, webinars, social media, email sales messages and the myriad of information channels we are all exposed to now makes keeping up to date a bit like a gym session, you know you need to do it to be fit, you just have to brace yourself a bit to get going because you know you will feel better after!

Ultimately, with the right choices and investment you can make your customer’s experience, even if like us you are chasing debt and mandated to take court action, a clear and understandable one simply by making all the channels into and around your business as slick and user friendly as can be! Not rocket science is it?

This article is provided for general information only. Please do not make any decision on the basis of this article alone without taking specific advice from us. stevensdrake will only be responsible for the advice we give which is specific to you.

Contact us