Professional Credit’s mission to positively transform the account receivable industry improves the consumer and client experience through the application of cutting-edge technology and a focus on treating people with dignity and respect.
We apply cutting-edge technology for our consumers’ and clients’ benefit and to improve our own employees’ lives. By creating bots, we are able to eliminate many redundant, repeatable tasks that our staff has historically been responsible to execute. This allows employees to take on more interesting and valuable tasks. As a result, we have seen employee satisfaction and retention increase, along with the increase in the recovery of bad debt collections.
Professional Credit’s VP of Data Management, Ralph Hall, said that “as we have used these tools to automate repetitive, sometimes tedious tasks, we have realized several gains: 1) consistently accurate processing – with built-in exception handling, 2) large numbers of tasks being able to process during off hours, and 3) development of a remarkable ability to implement solutions to complex issues that would be extremely difficult otherwise.”
Hall notes that intensive applications of technology have included, “recent complicated regulation changes, new client implementation process creation, and establishing new workflows and processes for our existing clients.”
As a happy side-effect, automating these processes offers our most cherished employees – the human ones – the most engaging, challenging, and meaningful work. In turn, we can offer our clients faster, better, more reliable services that ultimately lead to the best revenue recovery.
“The main benefit is that we can grow without having to increase our expenses,” said Kim Coble, Professional Credit’s Trust and Treasury Manager. “[Robotic Process Automation (RPA)] allows us to compete at a higher quantity level without incurring unnecessary expenses that often accompany manual processes. Additionally, automation allows our team to focus on creating impactful process improvements rather than just the day-to-day tasks. A less noticeable, but positive effect of automation is the motivation it has on our employees. They know that a process that used to take a month can be reduced to a couple of days.”
And we pass along the benefits of a more robust third-party debt collections workflow to our clients.
“[RPA] makes us more timely when it comes to deliverables,” Coble said. “If we’ve made a mistake, we can identify it in a few days, instead of a few months with our automated reporting.”
For example, Coble and her team in Professional Credit’s Trust department use RoboDX™ to assure quality and turnaround when a client requests a customized report. If a client needs a data report in a format that isn’t our standard, we can adapt so that we can offer our clients seamless collaboration.
Hall recalled another recent success in using technology to sort out the implementation of California’s AB1020 requirements. “When we heard of the requirements to get a letter from our client, marry it up to the correct validation we would be sending, it was a lot to take in and would have put a significant burden on our team member’s time But, our team used our RPA tool to handle all of the requirements.” He says the solution not only saved time but, “really made the solution possible.”
Professional Credit’s Data Management team and other departments have adopted these technologies because they see the impact on their time and how it allows them to focus on more creative and rewarding tasks. Whatever tools you use, you need a good team using them.
“RPA, and all the technology we have, is a differentiator for us. We have a lot of amazing technology,” Hall said, “but we also have a remarkable team that knows how to creatively use the tools that others may not.”