The WOW! Buzz

Steve - Credit and Collections Specialist

  Today I bring you a very difficult job, here at WOW!.  This is the job of the Credit and Collection Specialist. No one wants to hear that they are behind on their payments or possibly too embarrassed to admit it.  The economy is hard enough on individuals as it is.  The Credit and Collection Specialist job is to make arrangements for payments or to collect on past due balances.  This involves a great amount of tact as well as patience. Below is a small part of their day-to-day life:

  One of our highly respected Credit and Collections Specialist, Steve, was nice enough to spend a little time answering the following questions for me:

•         Tell me what a typical day in the life of WOW! Credit and Collection Specialist is like?

Steve – Most of our customers are in the Eastern time zone, so when we open up here at 6:00 AM Mountain time, we’ve usually got a lot of people waiting to take advantages of the services we offer. I often think that call centers are like restaurants. Everybody tends to come at the same time. So first thing in the morning we have our, “Breakfast rush.” We spend the first few hours every morning trying to make payment arrangements on the inbound calls as quickly and efficiently as possible. Each rep is assigned to take a shift distributing the voicemails we receive and each of them is assigned a region for the inquires that come to us on line from the Customer Care reps. Once that’s done, we make outbound calls on the delinquent accounts in each region, depending on the days past due and the reps are also required to follow up on the payment arrangements that they’ve set up on a daily basis. If a rep is out, each one has a “Payment Buddy,” who checks their payments for them.  We have three dedicated reps who deal exclusively with the charges for unreturned equipment on disconnected accounts. So, we stay pretty busy back here.

•         What are the tools you have available to do your job?

Steve – We have three tools that are most important to us. The first two are a calendar and calculator. We can set up a payment arrangement up until 64 dpd for the balance on the account, since that will be the past due on day we run it, or for the current past due amount up until 59 dpd. The most important tool we have available to us is the experience each rep brings to the job. We’re lucky in the fact that most of our reps have been with us for quite a while, so it’s unlikely that they’ll run into a situation that they won’t know how to deal with. In addition to setting up payment arrangements, we’re also responsible for reviewing delinquent accounts and educating our customers as to their cycle dates, due dates and the amounts that need to be paid in order to avoid interruption of service.  Systematically, we have developed our own Collections web forms over the past seven years. This software allows us to set up post dated payments in a system that runs the payments automatically from a data base program also developed internally.

•         What’s the most rewarding part of your job?

Steve – The best part of our job is when we can collect the amount due and save the account from going to hard cut. This saves at least one truck roll if they get disconnected and a second one if the services are restarted. It’s just a Win/Win for everyone involved. We often have our customers tell us that that one of the reasons they stay with WOW is that we’ll work with them when nobody else will.

•         What training do you have to go through to do your job?

Steve – I do the training for the new reps that start in Collections. We have a training manual that we go through. However, the most valuable training they get is, “hands on.” They and I will work together as a team on an account. Once they’re ready, I’ll announce to our customer that I’m going to let the new person get some practice while I stand by as a, “Lifeguard.” After all, the only way to learn how to do something is to actually do it. We also have them side jack with the other reps in the Dept., so they can take advantage of each person’s individual techniques and best practices.

•         What’s the most asked question you get from customers?

Steve – The most asked question we get from our customers is how can they can get their services restored and avoid a hard cut when they can’t afford to pay their delinquent account at this time. Now, we’re not miracle workers and we don’t issue Harry Potter magic wands to the collectors. However, we are able to save a great deal of them. (Over 36,000 in 2009).

•         Can a WOW! Credit and Collection Specialist answer other questions about my service?

Steve – We are able to answer other questions about WOW services only minimally. As a rule, due to the extreme work load we deal with pertaining to strictly Collections issues, it tends to be a more efficient use of time and company resources to transfer them to the dept. that deals with these issues on a more frequent basis. Our only 2 responsibilities are to set up post dated payments and charge for unreturned equipment. Collections reps are not trained for tier or sales job process.

 
  Again, this job is hard enough in a good economy let alone how it has been lately.  If you ever have the chance to speak with one of these wonderful people, please remember they are trying to help you, not make your life harder.

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