Closing the Books: Training & Developing Representatives to Succeed

To create a winning formula for a compassionate and empathetic approach to the collections’ process, Allison Johnson, Training & Development Manager at IC System, knows the secret is in training. A well trained and developed team of collection representatives are the backbone of any collection agency, and Johnson was excited to share her approach.

“Our main priority is making sure that the new hires have a solid understanding of the importance of compliance and quality,” Johnson said. “With the collection agency being so regulated, it’s important new hires understand that we’re handling private consumer information. And we also want to provide an excellent consumer experience, so focusing on quality and compliance are our main priorities.”

To achieve these quality and compliance results, IC System developed an online e-learning platform to roll out different interactive lessons for the representatives to stay engaged while training. There’s plenty of hands-on training in addition to the online tools.

Before the COVID-19, pandemic representatives in training could shadow right next to another representative. “That side-by-side training was critical for them to get a good grasp of the type of calls that they’re going to be handling,” Johnson said. “But with social distancing, we haven’t been able to do that, so we got creative with our team and came up with the virtual shadowing program. We use Microsoft Teams to get this done. Our tenured reps can hop on a Microsoft Teams call and share their screen so the new hires can look at the account that they are working on. The representatives can hear the consumer and the other representative speak on that phone call.” The ability to find creative solutions to crises is part of what makes Johnson’s training and development strategies successful.

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