What makes a good debt collector, and what do top collectors do differently?

What the sources say strong collectors do

The question is asked often, in search and across the industry. The answers from people who run collection floors, and from the little research there is, come back to a short list of habits.

• They ask for the payment. It sounds obvious. Call Centre Helper’s article on speech analytics in debt collection (Jonty Pearce, 2010, updated 2019) reports that call recordings show many collectors never ask for one. In a PDCflow panel on call scripts (2024), an agency training director puts the payment request in the opening of the call.
• They stay on the call when it gets hard. In a PDCflow recap of an AccountsRecovery.net webinar (2020), one panellist advised against ending a call when a consumer lashes out, and pointed out that anger often is not a refusal or a dispute.
• They ask open questions, then listen. Another panellist on the same webinar suggested asking the consumer to tell what happened before the account went to collection. The details an upset consumer shares are often what moves the call forward.
• They agree a plan the consumer can keep. The panel’s examples: fit payment dates to when the consumer is paid, and be wary of tiny payments stretched over years. The offers themselves are the agency’s and its clients’.
• They keep the tone calm and plain. One panellist in an AccountsRecovery.net webinar recap (2022) warned that jargon and acronyms can end a conversation. An insideARM report from 2010, on how speech analytics was shaping collectors’ wording, noted that intimidating language can breach the FDCPA.

What consumers say they need

Research from the consumer’s side is thinner than the advice. Working together (2013), by Sharon Collard at the University of Bristol’s Personal Finance Research Centre, was commissioned by the debt purchaser Arrow Global. Its summary reports that how a creditor communicates shapes whether a customer in debt keeps talking at all, and that customers want empathy, practical help and a solution worked out with them.

That lines up with the habits above. Staying on the call, listening and agreeing a workable plan are all ways of showing the consumer that someone has understood their situation.

The ingredient underneath: empathy

Most of those habits are empathy in practice: seeing the account from the consumer’s side, keeping judgement out of it, hearing the emotion, and saying back what you heard. Why empathy matters on a collection call sets out what it is made of, from Carl Rogers and nursing research.

The persuasion research describes what empathy makes possible. A promise binds more when the consumer makes it in their own words to someone who listened, and the right questions let the consumer describe their own situation. What the persuasion models say about collection calls covers Cialdini and SPIN, with the compliance line on each. Will AI voice bots replace human collectors? covers one field study on what happens when the caller is not a person at all.

Good at what? The same collector on different accounts

A leaderboard ranks collectors on one number. In our view that hides most of what matters: a collector can lead the floor on one kind of account and sit near the average on another, while a colleague shows the opposite pattern. Persuasion depends on who is persuading whom. Why collectors convert at different rates shows how to see this in your own call and payment history.

This is also where BestPair works. It decides which collector works each account from the floor’s own outcomes. It does not listen to calls or score collectors’ skills, and people make every call.

How to find out what your own best collectors do

1. Compare collectors on the same kinds of account, on dollars collected per account contacted, not on raw totals.
2. Listen to the strongest collector’s calls on the accounts where they lead, and to an average collector’s calls on the same kind of account.
3. Write down the differences you hear, and coach them.
4. If you change something across the floor, test it: split accounts at random and run both ways in the same weeks. How to prove a change worked.

Everything here stays inside the FDCPA, Regulation F, state law and your agency’s rules.

Sources

• Speech analytics in debt collection: Call Centre Helper, Jonty Pearce, 2010 (updated 2019), on what call recordings show collectors do and miss.
• 5 Debt Collection Call Center Script Questions Answered: PDCflow blog, agency and ACA International trainers on scripts and call openings.
• Payment negotiation tips for past due accounts: PDCflow recap of an AccountsRecovery.net webinar with three agency leaders.
• How collectors should respond to common scenarios with consumers: AccountsRecovery.net recap of a role-play webinar.
• Technology is shaping the words collectors use: insideARM trade report, 2010, on speech analytics and collection wording.
• Working together: Personal Finance Research Centre, University of Bristol, on why consumers in debt engage or disengage.