Why does empathy matter on a collection call, and how is it built?

Empathy means walking in the consumer’s shoes, and showing it

The old idiom says empathy is walking in someone else’s shoes. Two pieces of research turn that into parts you can name.

Carl Rogers set out the conditions he believed a person needs in order to change in "The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change" (Journal of Consulting Psychology, 1957). One of them is empathic understanding. The listener senses the other person’s world from inside their frame of reference, as though it were their own, while never forgetting that it belongs to the other person. The listener then has to communicate that understanding so the other person can perceive it. Later in his career Rogers came to see empathy as perhaps the most important of his conditions. He was writing about therapy, and nothing in the paper is about selling or collecting.

Theresa Wiseman’s "A concept analysis of empathy" (Journal of Advanced Nursing, 1996) was written for nursing and has been widely used since. Its four attributes, as they are commonly summarised:

1. Seeing the world as the other person sees it.
2. Staying out of judgement.
3. Recognising the emotion the other person is feeling.
4. Communicating that understanding back to them.

What it sounds like on a collection call

Chris Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator, gives collectors practical tools in Never Split the Difference (2016, written with Tahl Raz). He calls the approach tactical empathy: understanding how the other side feels and thinks, and what lies behind it, in order to gain influence. Three of his techniques fit a collection call:

• Labelling. Name the emotion you hear: "It sounds like this month has been a hard one."
• Mirroring. Repeat the consumer’s last few words so they keep talking: "Not the full amount this month?"
• Calibrated questions. Ask "how" and "what": "What would a payment you could keep to look like?"

All of it sits inside the agency’s own scripts and compliance rules. The point of the call stays the same: a payment or an arrangement the consumer can actually keep, because a plan agreed in a hurry and broken next month collects little.

Empathy and agreement are different things

Rogers built the limit into his definition: the listener enters the other person’s world while keeping their own position. Staying out of judgement, in Wiseman’s sense, means holding back blame. It leaves the balance where it was. Voss treats empathy as a way to gain influence in a negotiation.

On a collection call, that means a collector can understand a hardship completely and still ask for a payment. The skill is in doing both on the same call.

Why it is hard to automate

This is our view. A voice bot can say the words of empathy. Rogers and Wiseman both put the weight on the last step, the other person perceiving that they have been understood, and that is where a bot struggles, most of all when the consumer knows it is a bot. Empathy is very hard to fake.

One study of real collection calls points the same way: 21 percentage points fewer borrowers promised to repay on the first call they answered when the caller was an AI voice bot (Choi, Huang, Yang and Zhang, NBER working paper w33669, 2025). Will AI voice bots replace human collectors? covers what that study measured and what it did not.

Where pairing comes in

Collectors differ in how well they persuade, and the differences show up in results: in what each collector collects on each kind of account. BestPair does not listen to calls or score empathy. It works from outcomes in your floor’s own call and payment history and decides which collector works each account. People make every call.

The published case study states our reading as a hypothesis: the more persuasion an account needs, the more it matters who is on the call (the case study). Why collectors convert at different rates shows how to see those differences in your own history, and what the persuasion models say about collection calls covers Cialdini and SPIN.