Getting paid is a difficult job, and one that small businesses often struggle with. Customers will surprise you with excuses and disputes that can severely influence your cash flow. In this post we'll discuss ways to engage with your customers early so you won't have to send them to small business collections. Prepare to Receive Less Than 100% of What You Are Owed Some customers won't pay, no matter what you do. They may disagree they need to pay at all, irresponsible, or genuinely had a life event that impact their ability to pay. You'll eventually need to use a trusted third party like TrueAccord to get these ones to pay. Accepting this saves you time and heartache - there's a limit to the number of calls and reminders you should offer late payers and a limit to the time you or your team should spend on them. Still, there are ways to get closer to 100% even before using a small business collection service. Reducing the Rate of Late Payers Preventing late payments requires a structured process to keep them aware of their obligation, deal with expected excuses, and following up until you get paid. Specifically, pay attention to the following: Be planned with giving out credit. Negotiate payment terms in advance, write them down, and limit how much risk you take in every transaction. Adopt pre-paid models whenever possible, and require a payment instrument before you let customers use your product. Beware of new customers, those without a long established history, that run up a balance on their first days or weeks. If you run an eCommerce business or a marketplace, frequent and aggressive purchasing sprees from new customers are a major red flag and should be stopped and examined by your risk team. Be prompt in issuing your invoice or charging a payment instrument post completion of a job or with following up on late payments. Have a process for following up on chargebacks, outstanding balances, or invoices early and often, even if you end up sending some balances to a small business collections partner. Even if you don't get paid on time, keeping on top of customers increases awareness and prepares them to negotiate payment terms when they're able to. Be frictionless in your methods of payment. Keep a payment instrument on file even if your model is post payment, and verify it with a $0 authorization or random charges. The more payment options you have, especially the more backup payment options, the better your chances of getting paid. PayPal was able to recover more than 95% of failed ACH payments thanks to using cards as backup payment instruments. Be polite in your communication with your customer. They might not pay you today, but end up being a valuable long term customer if you just work with them through their current situation. Your goal with your receivable management process isn't only to prevent late paying customers, it's also to retain relationships with the most valuable ones. Don't let a temporary situation ruin a beneficial long term relationship. Be ready to escalate. You may invest a lot of effort in order to prevent late paying customers, but you are not an A/R expert and are not planning to become one; your team isn't either. Using a third party takes emotion out of the equation, allows customers with service disputes to express themselves, and creates an opportunity to negotiate. Having a small business collections partner as a last resort also increases your chances of recovery just by informing customers that it's an option. We don't like it, and we're always focused on great UX, but the negative perception "debt collection" evokes can work in your favor. Bottom Line It's not easy to prevent late paying customers, but following a process, a few best practices, and using a strong small business collections partner can get you paid much sooner than you usually do. Think through your on-boarding, billing, and follow up process to significantly reduce the number of people who end up not paying - and talk to us when you're ready to hand them off. Interested in trying us out? Sign up here!

In this short talk, our CEO Ohad Samet and our Senior Manager of implementations, Robert Rodriguez, discuss the concept of a smoke test in high stakes integrations in collections and how they can help reduce errors and create early success.

How come every company hires the best people they can find, but some end up with a homogenous culture while others are diverse? It's about how you seed and grow your culture. Hear our Diversity, HR and Recruiting leaders talk about diversity, representation, and hiring diverse talent from day one.

Laura Beckerley discusses easy and difficult conversations with customers, and provides tips and ideas and how to diffuse difficult situations. Hear about her experience, how we engage, and what makes TrueAccord different - a customer facing brand through and through.

Working with major financial institutions has its upsides, but it also means a tight and very demanding quality framework. Our lead trainer, Quan Ngo, talks about tips and tricks for effective quality control in an ever changing environment.

UX and design are important tools in TrueAccord's tool box. Hear from our Product Design Manager, Shannon Brown, about how we design our product to empower customers and encourage positive actions.

Content is the life blood of our system. No matter the channel, the product, or the stage, content is what keeps our customers engaged, our performance high, and our compliance intact. Hear our manager of Content Strategy, Vivian Chau, talk about how we harness empathy to write effective content.

You may have read our post, 866 is our number. In this podcast, our Director of Product Roger Lai talks about our customer facing decisions, how we think of our brand, and what it means for customer responsiveness and satisfaction.

This year at DCS we'll be moderating or presenting in two sessions. Understanding What Consumers Want The consumer market is shifting. Where each of us once had one landline at home, we now all have cell phones and lap tops. Communication preferences have shifted tremendously. Join a roundtable to hear from peers about identifying consumer needs and how to respond to them in an ever changing technology and regulatory environment. Strategic Implementation of Machine Learning and AI in Your Collection Operations Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence hold a huge promise for the ARM industry. Are they all they are made out to be? Will AI be the job killer some fear it will be? Hear about strategies and tips for implementing ML and AI in a human decision-heavy market like ARM, how to integrate those technologies to create real leverage, and how to combine ML/AI with your collections staff. Check out the sessions and email our team at sales@trueaccord.com if you want to meet.

In December 2017 Bloomberg posted this infuriating story about a man who was hounded by phantom debt, and how his crusade took down a Bad Guy (recently sentenced to almost 17 years in prison). It’s a captivating story with a happy ending, but one quote really caught my eye: Therrien says he paid back the debt promptly. He was offended by the Lakefront woman’s suggestion that he was a deadbeat. “I’m a person who believes in personal friggin’ responsibility,” Therrien tells me. “I signed an agreement. And I fulfilled my obligation.” This quote demonstrates one of several key misperceptions of consumers in debt. It’s something I like to call “subprime blindness”, a deep seated lack of understanding of and empathy for the consumer’s experience, motivations, and psyche, and it has wide ranging effects on our ability to start, fund, and scale solutions for the debilitating debt problem in developed markets. Subprime blindness usually takes one of two forms: on one hand the condescending “it would never happen to me” approach, looking down on people in debt. This group thinks of debtors as morally inferior, deficient people choosing to remain in debt. The other is complete disregard of the reason most people are in debt, assuming everyone can afford to pay their debts if they were only afforded a convenient way to do so. Many investors I talk to have a story about debt, usually missed copay or some lingering internet subscription. To the well off it’s clear that they, and everyone they know, would pay if they just got a polite message. Neither approach is correct. The majority of consumers end up in debt because they lost a job, had a medical emergency, or experienced another significant life event. These are not careless spenders or malicious consumers who couldn’t care less about their debt. They are often trapped and are doing the best they can given dire circumstances. Subprime blindness stigmatizes being in debt and hampers any ability to offer long term solutions that improve financial health and build equity. This is what TrueAccord is solving. Radically changing debt collection is just step one. Our product relies on a radical—yet simple—alternative to Subprime Blindness: that consumers in debt are experiencing a temporary difficulty, and treating them like valuable customers will not only lead to better debt collection results, but will also help them build equity to eventually exit the cycle of debt.