CM July and August 2018

EDITOR’S COLUMN
Pays your money, takes
your choice
Sean Feast
Managing Editor
ONE of the trickiest
problems facing debt
collection agencies in
recent times has been how
to recognise and reward
their collections staff.
And by ‘recognition’ I mean, of course,
money, for as much as the new generation
of Millennials might harp on about job
satisfaction being more important than
cold, hard lucre, they will soon discover
with a mortgage to pay and children to
bring up that bean bags, meeting pods and
a fridge fully stocked with Fever Tree tonic
isn't all it’s cracked up to be!
The Financial Conduct Authority
consulted on the issue of remuneration,
and the industry perhaps wondered why
they bothered. All they really seemed to
say was that they had ruled nothing in or
out when it came to incentivising staff and
that any incentives needed to be balanced
by monitoring and identifying trends or
patterns in individual agent’s behaviour
(see article page 21).
The landscape for collections has
changed dramatically in the last decade
or so, and examples of poor practice are
now few and far between. Those that do
make the headlines are often historic. It is
true that financial incentives can lead to
wrong behaviours – one only has to think
of PPI to know this is true – and some
agencies have removed the concept of an
additional financial reward altogether in
favour of a higher basic salary coupled
with additional holidays, vouchers or
other such goodwill gestures.
But there is still a worrying disconnect,
in my opinion, between what the
clients (like the banks) say and what
they do, when it comes to measuring
performance. Sure, they talk a good fight
about high compliance and QA scores,
and low numbers of complaints, but the
ultimate measure is still how much of
the customers’ money has the agency
managed to recover. They even publish
league tables to show how each of the
agencies are performing against their
peers.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that
agencies have, in the past, adopted a
similar mindset. They are, after all, in the
business of collecting money. And that is
the point I am trying to make. Agencies
should indeed look at creative ways of
recognising and rewarding their staff to
meet the needs of a modern generation
of client and customer, but they must also
recognise that in the end, whatever they
do, money talks.
The Recognised Standard / www.cicm.com / July/August 2018 / PAGE 4