The opening of a second collection facility will mean many changes for your agency. But what about your software? Does anything have to be done differently collection software used across more than one collection office? Collection Advisor spoke with industry technology thought leaders to find out.
Thomas Mohr CEO of Beam Software
Collection software should clearly and easily differentiate both physical and virtual office locations in order to readily accommodate assigning new business to the collection floor, meeting reporting needs and adhering to compliance requirements. Daily performance, productivity, and posting reports should easily identify different office locations as well.
Laurent Tabouelle Executive VP of Codix
When implementing a collection software across multiple offices, it is essential to define a core model for the mainstream operations. This will avoid setting up duplicate procedures for minor deviations. Usually this happens when stakeholders don’t step back and make the extra effort to identify how the various process variants could converge into a common way of doing things. Considering this objective, and a sufficiently parameterizable system, it is definitely possible to accommodate dozens of offices with homogeneous business processes. This helps reduce the technology spending and improve the global efficiency by leveraging best practices and lessons learned at a group level. Advanced system features such as segmentation and champion-challenger help complete the picture – providing the business with the flexibility it needs to adjust the specific collection strategies to the country, industry and product.
Tony LaMagna Partner at The Computer Manager
The functionality of collection software for businesses with more than one office will greatly depend on the business and corporate structure of the entity. Will all offices work from the same database or will each office have a database of accounts? Will one office act as host and the other offices remote in? Are the billing and trust accounts centralized or separated by office or region? Will each office work under the same name or will each office be named differently? The answers to these questions will determine the approach of account and trust management in the collection software. Flexibility is key, particularly the ability to manage multiple databases within the collection software.
Fritz Schulze President and CEO of Comtech Systems
Multiple offices within one company suggest a segmentation of accounts by type, geography, legal/non-legal, pre/post-judgement or other criteria that requires a regular data flow between offices. Agencies can use their collection software to structure and automate their data flow so accounts are processed and transferred between offices during non-working hours, so staff can start collecting as soon as the office opens. Alternatively, if all offices work on the same set of accounts, or some staff works remotely, and the company wants to avoid hardware expenses, a cloud solution will make the program and data available to anyone with an internet connection regardless of their location. For a premise site, separate installations may be advantageous.
Jeff Dantzler President of Comtronic Systems
With multi-site operations, it’s about delivering a secure and consistent user experience under a single, enterprise-wide system. Today’s cloud-based platforms are prime to handle these requirements and more. While a single office operation may choose a cloud-based system as well, it becomes even more critical when spanning across multiple locations.
Lex Patterson President of DAKCS Software Systems
Secure, responsive access from any location is important to easily manage connection and roles for security and reliability. A cloud-based model works great, but on-premise solutions should have the capability as well. Data segmentation allows you flexibility in managing trust accounts and collector workloads. Having automated tools to process accounts and report on activity from each location is vital. The ability to quickly adjust user count to accommodate operational changes prevents hold ups in your business organization’s timeline.
Matthew Hill President / CEO of InterProse
Nothing really. True SaaS is highly accessible from multiple locations with virtually no consideration needed for system architecture.
James Dunlap CEO of Lariat Software
When operating in a distributed environment, accessibility is key, both technologically and operationally. Technologically, cloud based systems have revolutionized geographically distributed teams by offering real time access to data from a host of devices. System users may not be in the same office but they will require the same access to the information. The agent in Tampa needs the same access to information as the agent in New York. Geographically distributed teams always present a challenge to creating a cohesive company culture. Well-designed collections software has the capacity to help facilitate information and communications between distributed team members. This can be done through features such as integrated chat functionality, shared team goals, live accomplishment feeds and live leader boards. The team in Tampa can't see the whiteboard in New York but they both can see the dashboard in the cloud.
Ranjan Dharmaraja CEO of Quantrax
In a multi-office environment, consider cross training and the need for different business rules for the different operations. Early-out operations are an example of where separate companies are set up for early-out and bad debt businesses. Think about how each database is accessed and make sure you can easily transfer accounts between companies. For minimal duplication of effort, your system should allow business rules to be set up at the global or company level. Security must limit access to each company, based on roles.
Dan Hornung President of Roydan
Supporting multiple collection offices comes in different flavors. Do you want to run both business entities within the same database, or separate databases? Keeping both offices within the same database provides the flexibility of sharing debtors across business units or locations, yet running the operations and workflows independently. Separate databases provide complete separation between business units, which is usually the case when a company has both collection and extended business office functions.
Chris J. Roberts President and COO of Sentinel Development Solutions
Of the many things to consider some of the most important are:
• Decisions regarding physical versus logical segregation of data – in other words, do you need to have separate databases (for compliance) or will logical organization of data in a single database be sufficient?
• The ability to configure your collections software to allow access to data based on office/users?
• Whether your reporting solution enables you to get the information you need to effectively analyze comparative performance. • Automation unique to multiple offices may be necessary to move inventory among offices.
• Asset investment tracking features are often an important part of multiple office deployments.
• Decisions regarding communication between offices (chat features) • Decisions regarding branding may be necessary if there are multiple entities.
Chris Campbell CEO of Simplicity Collection Software
The answer to this question varies based on your collection software solution. A web or cloud-based software solution typically needs little or no configuration changes in order to securely operate across various physical offices. Typically a web or cloud-based software solution is more cost effective, flexible and reliable as additional hardware and infrastructure is not needed in order to operate seamlessly across physically dispersed offices. Traditional collection software solutions that require software installations on a physical device like a computer must be secured across a WAN (Wide Area Network) or Remote VPN (Virtual Private Network) connections in order to operate in an interoffice environment. Generally if operating over a WAN or VPN, the system is prone to connectivity issues due to hardware and infrastructure failure. These types of interoffice connections typically require additional expenses in specialized hardware and infrastructure (firewalls, VPN concentrators, switches) and an IT staff ready and able to troubleshoot problems as they arise.