Why Do You Need a Collection Call Script?
Collection call scripts are an absolute ‘must’ to make sure any business gets their invoices paid on time and without upsetting their customers.
What Happens When You Don’t Use a Collection Call Script?
When you don’t use a call script you can end up saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Who hasn’t felt intimidated and been stuck for words when asking customers to pay?
The problem is that, when you don’t know what to say, you can avoid contacting your customer at all. It’s like a vicious circle. It can be very stressful.
If you don’t chase payment up, the debt just gets older. The older a debt gets, the more likely it is to become a bad debt. Small business owners need to do everything they can to avoid bad debts.
Bad debt costs a business much more than the face value of the invoice and can have a devastating effect. A small business report from the US says…
“…average bad debt is $73,000, which for SMEs can cause business concerns…”
Statistics for other western countries are very similar.
When to Use a Collection Call Script
Making sure that invoices get paid on time can be fraught with difficulty. So many things can happen between receiving a customer’s order and the invoice being due for payment.
Depending on the size of the customer’s company, you may have to negotiate your way around several different people, departments and scenarios to eventually get your invoice paid.
Because knowing what to say, when to say it and who to say it to is so important to make sure invoices get paid on time, I developed and refined a series of call scripts to use in my own small business.
I developed 30+ collection call scripts for all the different situations we encountered trying to get our invoices paid.
Collection call scripts for situations like these…
- Making sure the customer will approve the invoice for payment when it left our offices.
- Explaining payment terms (and changing them if they are the cause of late payments).
- A call script to manage the ‘curved ball’. How to feel confident when a customer asks something that you don’t know the answer to
- Collection call scripts to make sure payment will arrive by the due date
- Multinational and corporate companies not paying on time
- Government departments not paying by the due date
- Call script to improve the payments of existing clients who habitually pay late
- A script to train new customers to pay on time
- Collection call scripts to find the decision maker
- Getting paid on time when the customer uses a ‘shared service’ accounts team
- Getting paid when the accounts department is ‘off-shore’
- How to get hold of the elusive person? The person who seems to be avoiding you.
- Scripts to use so large value invoices won’t be held up for payment
- Scripts explaining what not to say and which words you shouldn’t use
- Resolving queries instantly so invoices under query are still paid on time.
- Scripts to get answers and commitment to pay from customers.
- Collection call scripts for getting past ‘the gatekeeper’.
- The scripts to find out if there are any red flags. Any potential bad debtors
- A script to keep control and track of our money – all the time
All our staff had access to the call scripts, so they always felt 100% confident if they found themselves talking to a customer about an invoice.
Do you have the collection call scripts you need to make sure you get paid on time, every time?
To your business success!
