Collecting and the objectives

Yesterdays post was about your reaction to taking that first call because your car finance loan was in arrears. This one is a bit of insight from the collector who will be calling you.
First off, your details are going to be in the auto dialer at the car finance company, I mentioned this yesterday. Now this person will usually be in a call center of the car finance company, have targets and hate his or her job and be speaking to people trying to weasel out of paying for their car loan all day. Not a good start for you eh?

So first off the call is placed by the car finance company auto dialer, then your details will appear on their screen when you answer the call. If you don’t answer the call then it will usually try the other numbers on file for you in quick succession, each waiting for the call to be answered or not as the case may be. As soon as the call is live your details will appear on the screen of the caller. Sometimes, odd things happen here, for instance if the car finance organisation use a predictive dialer and the call center is busy, you might actually not get anybody on the line immediately. There's a marked delay between you answering the call and somebody actually talking to you, then you know their busy!

The car finance employee calling you doesn’t have enough time to read all the comments on your file, if any. This is why they always seem to have the same introduction - security questions, statement of balance and can you pay the balance now. This is so you have to take time to respond which enables a sort of catch-up period for the collector to look at some key details while your answering them.

So, the collector’s objective - Well it used to be something like:
1. What’s the problem for the payment arrears.
2. What’s the solution to stop this happening again?
3. Can they pay now and clear the arrears on your car finance.

This is usually why you get asked why you haven't made the payment to your car finance. There’s some real obvious NO NO's here, the collector isn't looking for: Uhm, couldn’t be bothered about my car finance, I'm busy call me back later type of replies, there looking to get you off their queue. There’s nothing personal about the call, you will be one of perhaps hundreds of people this person is going to have to try and speak to about their car finance before they can go home, or more than likely, go to the pub to release the stress of all the car finance people in arrears.

So the car finance collector needs a result and you need a result. You do need to agree and stick with an arrangement to pay. Getting abusive or argumentative will get you nowhere. Your offhand comments will be noted and the next time you are called, you can bet your house on the fact that you will get a harder time if you’re not going to at least sound responsive to this person. You need to at least give the impression that you care about the loan and that you do want to resolve it, this way there’s a note on your account about how receptive you were and how you had a good attitude to sorting the problem out.

The obvious solution to solve the arrears, is to pay on time and if you do forget to pay, you try and get your account back up to date as soon as possible.