How do you get collectors to accept a new way of assigning accounts?

What collectors worry about

Floor managers raise the same worries:

• Pay. Collectors on an incentive plan want to know whether a new mix of accounts will cost them money, often with a monthly cut-off in mind.
• Fairness. Top collectors expect to lose the accounts they do best on. Newer collectors expect to be left with the hardest paper.
• Being scored. Anything that ranks collectors can feel like surveillance.
• Another screen. A new application on top of the dialer and the collection system tends to be ignored.
• Team leads who doubt it. If they do not believe in it, collectors learn to work around it.

Each of these has a plain answer, and the answer lands better before the first week than after it.

What changes on the dialer, and what stays

Collectors get no new application. On agent-owned lists, a daily assignment file sets which accounts load into each collector’s list, the way your lists load now. On a predictive dialer, the assignments sit in the dialer’s skills-based router, and collectors take calls as they always have. Which dialers BestPair works with.

Scripts, offers, settlement authority and contact rules stay with the agency, and FDCPA, Regulation F and TCPA controls are left as they are. People make every call. BestPair never dials, calls, texts or contacts a consumer.

Settle pay and fairness first

• Workload. Work spreads across the floor, and each collector’s volume stays where you set it, so a handful of people are not buried.
• Top collectors. Talk it through with them before the start. The control group shows whether their results hold up.
• New starters. They are treated as floor average and get a normal mix of accounts, not the leftovers. Pairing when collector turnover is high.
• Pay. Run the new mix through your incentive plan before the start, and say what you found.
• The comparison. Accounts are split at random between the BestPair group and a control group, so nobody’s results are flattered by easy paper.

What to tell the floor

Whether and how you explain it is up to you. If you do, one sentence covers it: each account goes to the collector who has done best on accounts like it, judged on this floor’s own payment history. Then say what it leaves alone. It does not listen to calls, rate effort or tone, or change what anyone says to a consumer.

The Floor Assessment (Stage 1) shows every collector against the floor average on each type of account. It gives a manager something specific to sit down with. Using it to coach collectors.

What floor managers do in the first weeks

1. Name one owner on the floor who answers questions, fixes problems and reports results.
2. Agree the rules before day one. How long an unworked account stays with a collector, when it is reassigned, and whether collectors may trade accounts.
3. Keep accounts with the assigned collector. In Stage 2, at least 70% of BestPair group contacts must reach the assigned collector, and that share is on every monthly statement.
4. Show the floor both groups’ results, flat months included.

Bring team leads in early. A team lead who knows why an account went to a particular collector explains it to the floor better than any vendor. If the first weeks trail the control group, this is why that can happen.