drafting your
DRAFTING YOUR
Compensation Playbook Does your compensation program drive compliance or complaints? How to motivate your collectors to follow the rules. By Anne Rosso May
Y
ou might be the nicest boss in the world, bringing in bagels on Fridays and giving staff members cards on their birthdays, but let’s be honest: Your employees are in it for the money. And there’s nothing wrong with that—unless your compensation plan is driving them to violate your policies and procedures in pursuit of a bigger paycheck. Using 100 percent performance-based pay for collectors is problematic for several reasons, the biggest of which is that it can put you at odds with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is looking at companies’ compensation programs to determine if they incentivize behavior that could hurt consumers. The $185 million fine it lobbed at Wells Fargo in September for having aggressive sales goals that drove employees to do deceitful things is a pretty significant wake-up call that your compensation program—and the behavior it motivates—matters. A lot. But how exactly should you go about modifying your compensation practices? What tools do you need to track employees’ compliance? What can you do
28
to help employees understand why you’re changing things up? Here’s how some ACA International members are tackling this essential project.
TECHNOLOGY CAN HELP Before you can tie compensation to compliance, you need a way to monitor your collectors’ behavior. Analytics technology can help here, tracking what your collectors are saying and comparing that data to your preprogrammed language parameters. When Stoneleigh Recovery Associates LLC decided to invest in a text and speech analytics system two years ago, Nikki Noyes, director of compliance, used it to revamp the company’s compensation plan. Before, incentives were paid based on the dollars each agent collected. Today, while the commission structure has remained mostly unchanged, there is one big difference: to qualify for it, collectors have to hit minimum compliance goals first. The compliance stats are pulled by the company’s analytics system, which looks for certain words collectors should be saying on
COLLECTOR 12.16
29
“We told them there’s more money for you to make, but in order to do it you have to have compliance and quality in your calls.” every call. The system generates an average score for all calls each collector places throughout the month. Once collectors hit the company’s goal for each compliance area they are eligible for reduced multipliers, which change how much they are required to collect before hitting a bonus. “They still can earn a bonus if they don’t meet the thresholds, but it would be significantly less and they would eventually end up on progressive discipline,” Noyes said. “Typically those people aren’t going to bonus anyway because they are in need of some help.” Noyes said that right now her analytics system monitors for the recording disclosure, right-party verification and Mini-Miranda. “In the future, I’d like to see it really beefed up,” she said. “To the point where compliments are giving you extra points and complaints are taking away points.” The CMI Group also uses speech analytics to evaluate call quality and collector compliance, but CEO Tom Stockton, IFCCE, noted that while such a system is nice to have, agencies really only need a basic level of technology to effectively administer a compliance-based compensation program: the ability to record and archive calls. “If you are recording every call and regularly monitoring them—pulling calls, compiling stats and seeing how each collector is doing—you can get a good picture of their overall compliance,” he said. Stockton said The CMI Group’s current compensation program is mostly based on information pulled from a manual listening process conducted by impartial quality assurance analysts. “We found that this is the most accurate and fair method of compliance monitoring,” said Brian Answeeney, director of collections for The CMI Group. “Removing analysts from reporting to managers removed any
30
actual or perceived conflict of interest and aligned the QA process with the objectives of the company.”
A CONSTANT PROCESS Changes to your compensation plan to meet regulator and client needs will likely be ongoing. Stockton and his team spent about a year refining the company’s compensation program before they felt it was truly optimized. Prior to the overhaul, The CMI Group was using speech analytics software to reward collectors and managers with an additional bonus for acceptable scores. “What we found was that the speech analytics technology was not accurate enough to stake a financial payout on and it was not modifying behavior,” Answeeney said. “Agents were simply being paid a bonus for something they would do by nature. These agents were not motivated by financial gain to give good quality, and agents with bad quality were not motivated by the additional bonus opportunity.” The company’s new bonus program is “score agnostic,” Answeeney said. Collectors earn a bonus based on their monthly revenue performance, and their bonus is reduced by any compliance violations. The reduction amounts are tiered, ranging from a 100 percent reduction for “zero tolerance” infractions down to 5 percent reductions for nonstatutory violations, such as deviations from a script or client standard. Overall, the new compensation program gave agents the opportunity to make more money. The amount of bonus earned is based strictly on performance achievements, but the final payout is tempered by the collector’s compliance results. “An agent who achieved superior performance from both a production and compliance perspective made more money than an agent with the same superior production and any number of compliance disincentive reductions,” Answeeney said. The compensation program wasn’t a hit with collectors right away, however; they needed time to adjust to the new system.
ACAINTERNATIONAL.ORG
“More agents were not hitting their goals and more agents were getting deductions at the beginning,” Answeeney said. “That lasted for about 90 days.” After that, the bonus pool participation started increasing, climbing to 89 percent two months later, and 99 percent two months after that. “The message there is that you have to be consistent, and the process will take some time,” Stockton said. “There are going to be problems at the beginning when you implement the program—people who just don’t get it or who aren’t quite sure what you are doing. Just stick with it and things should improve.” Today, The CMI Group has seen so much continual improvement that it’s just getting to the point of diminishing returns in terms of collector performance. “But the quality of our calls is so much better because we put this in place,” Stockton said. “We’ve been pleased, and our clients have been pleased.”
MONEY TALKS Do you understand what motivates your employees? Benjamin McNabb,
operations manager for Partners Financial Services, encouraged agencies to research the psychological impact of their compensation practices. “One of the pain points we found by engaging our agents was a struggle to pay bills when depending on a large percentage of their income coming from their monthly bonuses,” McNabb said. “As you can imagine, losing the bulk of your income due to a small, but equally important, technicality would cause a drop in overall morale, positive mental attitude and job performance.” By paying employees a higher hourly wage, with the potential to earn additional bonuses based on company performance and individual compliance, Partners Financial Services managers were able to alleviate that concern and improve collectors’ overall positive mental attitude toward compliance management—and work in general. The CMI Group took a similar approach, augmenting the bonus pool for compliance under its new compensation program. “We told them there’s more money for you to make, but in order to do it you
IS YOUR BONUS PLAN LEGAL? Make sure your pay practices comply with federal and state salary laws. Before making changes to your compensation and bonus plan, think about any risks you may be introducing. The Fair Labor Standards Act has something to say about how bonuses tied to productivity or profitability are calculated, and some states have restrictions on if and how employers can take deductions from employees’ paychecks or reduce their rate of pay. “In Illinois, we’re not allowed to take away money employees have already earned,” said Nikki Noyes, director of compliance for Stoneleigh Recovery Associates LLC. “So our policies are worded specifically to say that employees haven’t earned the incentives until they reach the minimum compliance requirement.” To be safe, consult with a human resources professional or even an employment law attorney to make sure your new compensation plan is compliant with both federal and state labor laws.
COLLECTOR 12.16
have to have compliance and quality in your calls,” Stockton said. “They saw it as a check and balance: Managed properly, they would get more money in their pockets every month.”
IMPLEMENT CONSEQUENCES FOR VIOLATIONS Your internal controls should take compliance missteps seriously, and employees should know that there will be consequences for bad behavior—up to and including termination. Disincentives can help deter sloppy or willfully negligent behavior. As mentioned earlier, The CMI Group has a per incident disincentive policy that addresses compliance and behavior issues. “In the past we’d require collectors to have a 90 percent compliance score, let’s say, but we didn’t have a disincentive on a per incident basis,” Answeeney said. “So we added consequences for things like not giving the Mini-Miranda or speaking disrespectfully to a consumer. If collectors failed to give required disclosures or did anything negative, we wanted to have a monetary disincentive that would affect their bonus.” Randy Hairgrove, president of RSH & Associates LLC, also uses disincentives to motivate collectors to comply with internal policies and industry regulations. If the company gets sued by a consumer due to a collector’s compliance error, a certain
31
54% “Today we don’t take good quality for granted— we celebrate it. Our collection department publicly recognizes outstanding quality.”
OF DISENGAGED EMPLOYEES WOULD LEAVE THEIR COMPANY FOR A RAISE OF 20% OR LESS, COMPARED TO 37% OF ENGAGED EMPLOYEES. Source: Gallup
amount gets charged back toward that employee’s potential future bonuses. “We’ve paid collectors commission and bonuses on accounts that have paid, but then we subsequently got sued on,” Hairgrove said. “My thought was that we need to get our team members to buy into the fact that we’re all in this together. So if they have a financial stake in it they are motivated to always do the right thing.” He noted that this applies only to collectors who fail to follow company rules. If the lawsuit is the result of a predatory attorney or the collector is not at fault, the collector’s bonus is not affected. “But if they are responsible for it, it can affect their future compensation—if they are not terminated,” he said. “Your account, your mistake. If you don’t follow policy and create a complaint or suit, you need to take ownership of that.”
CONTESTS AND ONGOING TRAINING Of course, too many disincentives can affect morale, so be sure to use positive reinforcement to encourage compliance as well. Contests for bringing in money
32
have long been popular in the collection industry, but today it might be more helpful to center your collection floor games on following the rules. Stoneleigh Recovery Associates runs a variety of contests focused on compliance. “We’ll announce that the person with the highest score at the end of the month will get a gift card to a restaurant or a gas station or something like that,” Noyes said. “We also have monthly awards to recognize employees with the highest compliance marks. We have a TV that scrolls through images of the award winners. It’s not monetary, but collectors enjoy being up there and giving each other credit.” Your training efforts play a key role in how seriously collectors take your commitment to compliance. Gloria Gerber, president of Oliver Adjustment Company of Kenosha & Racine, said the members of her four-person collection team have weekly meetings to discuss compliance topics. “They don’t know it’s important if you don’t show it to them,” she said. When The CMI Group reworked its compensation program, it also upped its QA procedures, implementing additional
ACAINTERNATIONAL.ORG
live agent monitoring, real-time feedback sessions as well as regular weekly side-bysides to go over results. “Today we don’t take good quality for granted—we celebrate it,” Stockton said. “Our collection department publicly recognizes outstanding quality. We started giving monthly awards to agents who make drastic improvements in quality as well as those who have exemplary quality scores.”
GET BUY-IN FROM ALL PARTIES Change is not easy, and you’ll need to get employees, company leaders and even clients on board with your new compensation approach to make it work. Until 2012, Partners Financial Services’ compensation plan was a “straight forward, simple, commission-based earning structure based on an agent’s total fee collected,” McNabb said. But after the CFPB announced its expectations for collector compensation, Partners Financial Services launched a tiered compensation structure that accounted for both performance and compliance. Agents were given the opportunity to receive four automatic compliance bonuses for meeting specific compliance criteria in a given month. If agents did not meet the compliance criteria, they would lose a percentage of their overall bonus, including their performance bonus. While the plan may have fit the CFPB’s expectations, employee morale suffered dramatically. McNabb noted that collectors became consumed with call audits, collection performance dropped out of their fear of making a mistake, dispute totals skyrocketed due to agents overcompensating for overshadowing violations, and the agents’ concentration shifted from serving clients and consumers to being “dinged” on their compliance review for bonus loss. So Partners Financial Services made some changes, and launched a new bonus structure in 2013 that balances employee morale and compliance. The company developed an updated call audit format to track each agent’s risk to the company, which then translates into an automatic pass or fail for
COLLECTOR 12.16
the month. To pass—and receive a bonus— the agent must have a 98 percent or greater compliance number. The company also included requirements for unpaid time off, key performance indicators and training. Plus, agents are paid higher hourly wages and have the opportunity to earn smaller bonuses based on overall company performance. The change rejuvenated collectors’ attitudes and made them much more receptive to the new program. At The CMI Group, Stockton said he’s learned that the key to the success of a new compensation program is commitment and consistency. “To get buy-in from the agents, we needed to ensure that a fair application of standards was being used to generate call grades,” Stockton said. “That, and the persistent reduction in bonuses for noncompliance, led to the buy-in that we needed to actually turn the corner from a results perspective.” Speaking of results, don’t be surprised if they suffer those first few months after implementation. Tell your clients what’s happening so they aren’t surprised either. “I know there is fear among management that if we commit to this we’re going to lose business and then we’ll be in trouble,” Stockton said. “I think that’s the biggest obstacle to overcome, to get leadership of the company to understand that not only should you put a program like this in place, but as you’re doing it you should inform clients what you are doing.” When you talk to clients, explain the reasons behind your new compensation program—that you are placing a higher priority on compliance for the safety of both your companies. “Tell them that they may see a temporary drop in performance, but stick with us,” Stockton said. “If you have good relationships with your clients, and they understand who you are, they will work with you. Commit to it, and help clients and employees understand that this is what we all have to do now. At the end of the day, it’s better for everybody.” Anne Rosso May is editor of Collector magazine.
KEYNOTES
1
Analytics technology makes it easy to monitor collector compliance, but it’s not essential. At minimum you need the ability to record and archive calls, and a staff member who is keeping tabs on what’s happening.
2
Your compensation system will likely evolve over time. Take in all feedback and be ready to make changes to keep compliance up, production high and collectors happy.
3
Get clients’ buy-in from the outset. If they are prepared for a temporary dip in revenue at the beginning of the program, you won’t lose business. 33
Compensation Playbook Does your compensation program drive compliance or complaints? How to motivate your collectors to follow the rules. By Anne Rosso May
Y
ou might be the nicest boss in the world, bringing in bagels on Fridays and giving staff members cards on their birthdays, but let’s be honest: Your employees are in it for the money. And there’s nothing wrong with that—unless your compensation plan is driving them to violate your policies and procedures in pursuit of a bigger paycheck. Using 100 percent performance-based pay for collectors is problematic for several reasons, the biggest of which is that it can put you at odds with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is looking at companies’ compensation programs to determine if they incentivize behavior that could hurt consumers. The $185 million fine it lobbed at Wells Fargo in September for having aggressive sales goals that drove employees to do deceitful things is a pretty significant wake-up call that your compensation program—and the behavior it motivates—matters. A lot. But how exactly should you go about modifying your compensation practices? What tools do you need to track employees’ compliance? What can you do
28
to help employees understand why you’re changing things up? Here’s how some ACA International members are tackling this essential project.
TECHNOLOGY CAN HELP Before you can tie compensation to compliance, you need a way to monitor your collectors’ behavior. Analytics technology can help here, tracking what your collectors are saying and comparing that data to your preprogrammed language parameters. When Stoneleigh Recovery Associates LLC decided to invest in a text and speech analytics system two years ago, Nikki Noyes, director of compliance, used it to revamp the company’s compensation plan. Before, incentives were paid based on the dollars each agent collected. Today, while the commission structure has remained mostly unchanged, there is one big difference: to qualify for it, collectors have to hit minimum compliance goals first. The compliance stats are pulled by the company’s analytics system, which looks for certain words collectors should be saying on
COLLECTOR 12.16
29
“We told them there’s more money for you to make, but in order to do it you have to have compliance and quality in your calls.” every call. The system generates an average score for all calls each collector places throughout the month. Once collectors hit the company’s goal for each compliance area they are eligible for reduced multipliers, which change how much they are required to collect before hitting a bonus. “They still can earn a bonus if they don’t meet the thresholds, but it would be significantly less and they would eventually end up on progressive discipline,” Noyes said. “Typically those people aren’t going to bonus anyway because they are in need of some help.” Noyes said that right now her analytics system monitors for the recording disclosure, right-party verification and Mini-Miranda. “In the future, I’d like to see it really beefed up,” she said. “To the point where compliments are giving you extra points and complaints are taking away points.” The CMI Group also uses speech analytics to evaluate call quality and collector compliance, but CEO Tom Stockton, IFCCE, noted that while such a system is nice to have, agencies really only need a basic level of technology to effectively administer a compliance-based compensation program: the ability to record and archive calls. “If you are recording every call and regularly monitoring them—pulling calls, compiling stats and seeing how each collector is doing—you can get a good picture of their overall compliance,” he said. Stockton said The CMI Group’s current compensation program is mostly based on information pulled from a manual listening process conducted by impartial quality assurance analysts. “We found that this is the most accurate and fair method of compliance monitoring,” said Brian Answeeney, director of collections for The CMI Group. “Removing analysts from reporting to managers removed any
30
actual or perceived conflict of interest and aligned the QA process with the objectives of the company.”
A CONSTANT PROCESS Changes to your compensation plan to meet regulator and client needs will likely be ongoing. Stockton and his team spent about a year refining the company’s compensation program before they felt it was truly optimized. Prior to the overhaul, The CMI Group was using speech analytics software to reward collectors and managers with an additional bonus for acceptable scores. “What we found was that the speech analytics technology was not accurate enough to stake a financial payout on and it was not modifying behavior,” Answeeney said. “Agents were simply being paid a bonus for something they would do by nature. These agents were not motivated by financial gain to give good quality, and agents with bad quality were not motivated by the additional bonus opportunity.” The company’s new bonus program is “score agnostic,” Answeeney said. Collectors earn a bonus based on their monthly revenue performance, and their bonus is reduced by any compliance violations. The reduction amounts are tiered, ranging from a 100 percent reduction for “zero tolerance” infractions down to 5 percent reductions for nonstatutory violations, such as deviations from a script or client standard. Overall, the new compensation program gave agents the opportunity to make more money. The amount of bonus earned is based strictly on performance achievements, but the final payout is tempered by the collector’s compliance results. “An agent who achieved superior performance from both a production and compliance perspective made more money than an agent with the same superior production and any number of compliance disincentive reductions,” Answeeney said. The compensation program wasn’t a hit with collectors right away, however; they needed time to adjust to the new system.
ACAINTERNATIONAL.ORG
“More agents were not hitting their goals and more agents were getting deductions at the beginning,” Answeeney said. “That lasted for about 90 days.” After that, the bonus pool participation started increasing, climbing to 89 percent two months later, and 99 percent two months after that. “The message there is that you have to be consistent, and the process will take some time,” Stockton said. “There are going to be problems at the beginning when you implement the program—people who just don’t get it or who aren’t quite sure what you are doing. Just stick with it and things should improve.” Today, The CMI Group has seen so much continual improvement that it’s just getting to the point of diminishing returns in terms of collector performance. “But the quality of our calls is so much better because we put this in place,” Stockton said. “We’ve been pleased, and our clients have been pleased.”
MONEY TALKS Do you understand what motivates your employees? Benjamin McNabb,
operations manager for Partners Financial Services, encouraged agencies to research the psychological impact of their compensation practices. “One of the pain points we found by engaging our agents was a struggle to pay bills when depending on a large percentage of their income coming from their monthly bonuses,” McNabb said. “As you can imagine, losing the bulk of your income due to a small, but equally important, technicality would cause a drop in overall morale, positive mental attitude and job performance.” By paying employees a higher hourly wage, with the potential to earn additional bonuses based on company performance and individual compliance, Partners Financial Services managers were able to alleviate that concern and improve collectors’ overall positive mental attitude toward compliance management—and work in general. The CMI Group took a similar approach, augmenting the bonus pool for compliance under its new compensation program. “We told them there’s more money for you to make, but in order to do it you
IS YOUR BONUS PLAN LEGAL? Make sure your pay practices comply with federal and state salary laws. Before making changes to your compensation and bonus plan, think about any risks you may be introducing. The Fair Labor Standards Act has something to say about how bonuses tied to productivity or profitability are calculated, and some states have restrictions on if and how employers can take deductions from employees’ paychecks or reduce their rate of pay. “In Illinois, we’re not allowed to take away money employees have already earned,” said Nikki Noyes, director of compliance for Stoneleigh Recovery Associates LLC. “So our policies are worded specifically to say that employees haven’t earned the incentives until they reach the minimum compliance requirement.” To be safe, consult with a human resources professional or even an employment law attorney to make sure your new compensation plan is compliant with both federal and state labor laws.
COLLECTOR 12.16
have to have compliance and quality in your calls,” Stockton said. “They saw it as a check and balance: Managed properly, they would get more money in their pockets every month.”
IMPLEMENT CONSEQUENCES FOR VIOLATIONS Your internal controls should take compliance missteps seriously, and employees should know that there will be consequences for bad behavior—up to and including termination. Disincentives can help deter sloppy or willfully negligent behavior. As mentioned earlier, The CMI Group has a per incident disincentive policy that addresses compliance and behavior issues. “In the past we’d require collectors to have a 90 percent compliance score, let’s say, but we didn’t have a disincentive on a per incident basis,” Answeeney said. “So we added consequences for things like not giving the Mini-Miranda or speaking disrespectfully to a consumer. If collectors failed to give required disclosures or did anything negative, we wanted to have a monetary disincentive that would affect their bonus.” Randy Hairgrove, president of RSH & Associates LLC, also uses disincentives to motivate collectors to comply with internal policies and industry regulations. If the company gets sued by a consumer due to a collector’s compliance error, a certain
31
54% “Today we don’t take good quality for granted— we celebrate it. Our collection department publicly recognizes outstanding quality.”
OF DISENGAGED EMPLOYEES WOULD LEAVE THEIR COMPANY FOR A RAISE OF 20% OR LESS, COMPARED TO 37% OF ENGAGED EMPLOYEES. Source: Gallup
amount gets charged back toward that employee’s potential future bonuses. “We’ve paid collectors commission and bonuses on accounts that have paid, but then we subsequently got sued on,” Hairgrove said. “My thought was that we need to get our team members to buy into the fact that we’re all in this together. So if they have a financial stake in it they are motivated to always do the right thing.” He noted that this applies only to collectors who fail to follow company rules. If the lawsuit is the result of a predatory attorney or the collector is not at fault, the collector’s bonus is not affected. “But if they are responsible for it, it can affect their future compensation—if they are not terminated,” he said. “Your account, your mistake. If you don’t follow policy and create a complaint or suit, you need to take ownership of that.”
CONTESTS AND ONGOING TRAINING Of course, too many disincentives can affect morale, so be sure to use positive reinforcement to encourage compliance as well. Contests for bringing in money
32
have long been popular in the collection industry, but today it might be more helpful to center your collection floor games on following the rules. Stoneleigh Recovery Associates runs a variety of contests focused on compliance. “We’ll announce that the person with the highest score at the end of the month will get a gift card to a restaurant or a gas station or something like that,” Noyes said. “We also have monthly awards to recognize employees with the highest compliance marks. We have a TV that scrolls through images of the award winners. It’s not monetary, but collectors enjoy being up there and giving each other credit.” Your training efforts play a key role in how seriously collectors take your commitment to compliance. Gloria Gerber, president of Oliver Adjustment Company of Kenosha & Racine, said the members of her four-person collection team have weekly meetings to discuss compliance topics. “They don’t know it’s important if you don’t show it to them,” she said. When The CMI Group reworked its compensation program, it also upped its QA procedures, implementing additional
ACAINTERNATIONAL.ORG
live agent monitoring, real-time feedback sessions as well as regular weekly side-bysides to go over results. “Today we don’t take good quality for granted—we celebrate it,” Stockton said. “Our collection department publicly recognizes outstanding quality. We started giving monthly awards to agents who make drastic improvements in quality as well as those who have exemplary quality scores.”
GET BUY-IN FROM ALL PARTIES Change is not easy, and you’ll need to get employees, company leaders and even clients on board with your new compensation approach to make it work. Until 2012, Partners Financial Services’ compensation plan was a “straight forward, simple, commission-based earning structure based on an agent’s total fee collected,” McNabb said. But after the CFPB announced its expectations for collector compensation, Partners Financial Services launched a tiered compensation structure that accounted for both performance and compliance. Agents were given the opportunity to receive four automatic compliance bonuses for meeting specific compliance criteria in a given month. If agents did not meet the compliance criteria, they would lose a percentage of their overall bonus, including their performance bonus. While the plan may have fit the CFPB’s expectations, employee morale suffered dramatically. McNabb noted that collectors became consumed with call audits, collection performance dropped out of their fear of making a mistake, dispute totals skyrocketed due to agents overcompensating for overshadowing violations, and the agents’ concentration shifted from serving clients and consumers to being “dinged” on their compliance review for bonus loss. So Partners Financial Services made some changes, and launched a new bonus structure in 2013 that balances employee morale and compliance. The company developed an updated call audit format to track each agent’s risk to the company, which then translates into an automatic pass or fail for
COLLECTOR 12.16
the month. To pass—and receive a bonus— the agent must have a 98 percent or greater compliance number. The company also included requirements for unpaid time off, key performance indicators and training. Plus, agents are paid higher hourly wages and have the opportunity to earn smaller bonuses based on overall company performance. The change rejuvenated collectors’ attitudes and made them much more receptive to the new program. At The CMI Group, Stockton said he’s learned that the key to the success of a new compensation program is commitment and consistency. “To get buy-in from the agents, we needed to ensure that a fair application of standards was being used to generate call grades,” Stockton said. “That, and the persistent reduction in bonuses for noncompliance, led to the buy-in that we needed to actually turn the corner from a results perspective.” Speaking of results, don’t be surprised if they suffer those first few months after implementation. Tell your clients what’s happening so they aren’t surprised either. “I know there is fear among management that if we commit to this we’re going to lose business and then we’ll be in trouble,” Stockton said. “I think that’s the biggest obstacle to overcome, to get leadership of the company to understand that not only should you put a program like this in place, but as you’re doing it you should inform clients what you are doing.” When you talk to clients, explain the reasons behind your new compensation program—that you are placing a higher priority on compliance for the safety of both your companies. “Tell them that they may see a temporary drop in performance, but stick with us,” Stockton said. “If you have good relationships with your clients, and they understand who you are, they will work with you. Commit to it, and help clients and employees understand that this is what we all have to do now. At the end of the day, it’s better for everybody.” Anne Rosso May is editor of Collector magazine.
KEYNOTES
1
Analytics technology makes it easy to monitor collector compliance, but it’s not essential. At minimum you need the ability to record and archive calls, and a staff member who is keeping tabs on what’s happening.
2
Your compensation system will likely evolve over time. Take in all feedback and be ready to make changes to keep compliance up, production high and collectors happy.
3
Get clients’ buy-in from the outset. If they are prepared for a temporary dip in revenue at the beginning of the program, you won’t lose business. 33
