Okay, now that I'm on a real computer let em see if I can recreate those posts.
After working 2 Chicago winters hanging siding and doing other construction work outdoors, I knew I had to a) keep my stupid butt in school and, b) find an indoor job. A friend who worked for Montgomery Wards in their collections dept gave me lead/got me an interview. It was for Min wage, but it was indoors and the hours were good (35ish hours per week, parttime.) It was in the basement of the Wards store in Yorktown Mall in Lombard, IL. a hop, skip, and jump from school.
There were 15 sections. (One for each billing cycle), each section had from 8-12 full-time (8am-4:30pm) collectors and 2-3 parttimers (3:30ish to 9pm, they were flexible on the hours for us.) Each FT had a group of accounts and had a goal of x% to bring current before the next cycle. Part-timers were assigned to work all the accounts or maybe focus on the accounts of one collector if they were having problems. Our goals were 22 calls, 11 contacts (leaving a message on an answering machine to give us a call counted), and 3 promises to pay per hour.
I found I was pretty good at it (That highly developed ability to fake sincerity and empathy
) Since I was the only person (it was surprisingly mostly women) with military experience, I was given all the military accounts (Find their unit and call their 1SG or CPO, and BOOM, payment arrives shortly thereafter.) Nothing like calling Germany and Korea on someone else's dime. "Hello 1SG !!!"
It would generally take you going about 15-30 days past due to get a call. At 10 days you got a "Hey, forget something?" letter. At 20 a "If you sent it, let us know so we can double check our system/records." After that, you got a call from yours truly, Mr. Friendly.
I really was. The goal was to get them to pay, not go all Boomhauer so they hated us.
However, if you were a "frequent flyer", the calls start as soon as you were past due.
Anywho, the rules for calling consumers were looser back then. If you had legitimate issues, we would work with you. I remember one lady who owed something over $10k and was sending in $5 a month. (We had stopped the interest.) Husband killed in a accident, that left her paralyzed. IIRC, the drunk driver that hit them was also killed, but had no insurance and no assets, so there was no there "there". What do you do? We reported her as current with the credit bureau. We also called her every month, simply because she like to talk to us. Had a few older customers that we did that with. (We reported those on our sheets as "Spent 25 minutes with Mrs. X tonight." to show that we weren't just screwing off.
This was back in old days. We did have a mainframe computer system and green screen dumb terminals to look at the account info and history's, but we had to dial each number by hand. Touch-tone desk phones at least.
About a year later, another of the Part-timers got me a Job at Dun & Bradstreet (he worked there full time). That was eye-opening (and a $2 hour raise). Commercial collections was way different. There were no rules. There were several companies that sold their receivables after they had gone anywhere from 45-120 days past due. We called as if we were the company. We each had to have a variety of names so that if someone called in looking for "Jim" their could route the call to the right collector (Some of us had several accounts which we shared and others had one, maybe two accounts). We had several PO boxes to mail checks to, and we all answered the phones "Receivables." The really fun ones were collecting for the creditors of Companies that had gone Tango Uniform. "Hey, I thought you guys went Bankrupt?" Ahhh, we did, but we've gone through it and you still owe us money.
Anybody here ever hear of "Farm Plan" (John Deere Financing). If "Tom" ever called you about your account with them in the mid to late 80's, that was me.
D&B did sell what ever it couldn't collect on to some collection agencies, but they transferred actual paper files that had all our notes and all in it. I don't know if Monkey Wards did with their bad debt, but I know we had 3 in house lawyers that were always busy. (You generally had 9-10 months to work out some arrangement or get sued. They never told us what the cut off was. Just accounts got referred to legal. Some came back to be worked on more, others, we never heard about again.
