Q & A Table of Contents
How Can We Convince Them We're Not Leg-breakers?
From: Michelle, Portland, Oregon
Question: How do you suggest training Negotiation skills to new bill collectors? I work for a bank and currently train all the new hires and I find it sometime difficult to train negotiation skills. People have this idea that collections is the old time breaking of the knee caps. Collections in this day and age and at this bank is about helping the customer resolve their issue and education. Yet I struggle on how to help them negotiate for payments.
Response: First a commercial message: it may well be that the best approach to providing negotiation training for your bank's collectors is to hire an external negotiation skills training organization -- such as The Negotiation Skills Company, Inc.
The best way to provide training in negotiation skills -- as well as other 'soft skills' -- is to focus on the philosophical approach you want your colleagues to use, study that approach, and then look for the best teaching methods for the relevant audience.
When your bank's collectors are dealing with people who owe money, the collectors need to ask a lot of questions to find out what will enable folks to pay their debts, what will motivate them, and what creates the risk of an adversary relationship. Thus it could make sense for you to look at tools collectors can use to develop and ask good questions -- and then process the information they receive in a way to provide the education and issue resolution tools the bank feels are most likely to yield a mutually-acceptable agreement. A one-sided resolution won't work; whichever party feels as if they got the short end of the stick will do their best to avoid fulfilling their part of the agreement. In cases with that result, the negotiation has failed.
Good luck with your training process.
Steve
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