It’s easy to sum up our success with Elance-oDesk: for every $1 of debt we recovered, they have seen more than $2 of additional, post-recovery payments from these customers. These are pretty compelling numbers. For perspective, let’s rewind.
Elance-oDesk is one of the world’s largest online workplaces. More than 2.5M businesses and more than 8M freelancers converge on www.elance.com and www.odesk.com to work together via the Internet. By the end 2014, the merged companies expect to see more than $900 million in billings. However, before TrueAccord, many of those billings had gone awry.
The Challenge
Elance-oDesk is a volume business, with many of its account balances falling well below the $1,500 past-due minimum required by many traditional debt collectors. What’s more, Elance-oDesk’s brand ID involves a personal touch that’s pretty much unheard of with traditional collections agencies. Therefore TrueAccord’s biggest challenge was to recover payments without sacrificing the Elance-oDesk brand experience.
The Solution
TrueAccord differentiated itself from other solutions based on our ability to handle any size debt and our customized approach to individual debtors that focused on recovering lost relationships instead of simply demanding payment. The first step was reactivating all of the old debts collecting dust on Elance-oDesk’s shelves and letting our automated system pursue payments.
Second, TrueAccord’s proprietary Proactive Loss Management system leveraged a combination of big data and machine learning not only to customize correspondence based on individual debtors, but to do so at scale. In the past year alone, Elance-oDesk has placed several million dollars of old and new debts in TrueAccord’s charge.
The Result
TrueAccord didn’t just deliver money in the bank. We connected with debtors in a way that made them want to re-engage, stick around and continue paying. After all, it’s much cheaper to retain a customer than to find a new one, and there are long-term economic advantages to bringing delinquent payers back into the fold.
From its inception, TrueAccord aimed to mend a completely broken industry. Elance-oDesk is a great example of how our approach has healed relationships and restarted cash flow. Check out the full Elance-oDesk case study here and let us know your thoughts in comments.