Technology

As we’ve been reporting in our quarterly Credit & Debt Collection Industry Confidence Survey, many collection agencies have been employing new strategies to recover debt and contact consumers.

In the open-ended questions where we allow comments, many survey participants noted that they are deploying technology solutions to deal with rising inventories but strained collections. So we drilled down on some technologies that were recurring in the comments and contacted some service providers.

We learned that many collection agencies are using technology on the most basic interaction with debtors, location and initial contact (“Collection Agencies Experimenting with Technology to Deliver Results in Tough Times,” June 10). Hosted automated dialing processes, caller ID masking, text messaging…it’s all being tried.

The article gave rise to a pretty interesting comments thread where readers asked specific questions about the technology. It’s nice for us, since we had hoped that’s what the comments would be used for when we initially launched them (rather than what many threads have devolved into recently).