How can one “C” help a “C” build three other “C’s”? The answer is in this week’s Training Bytes video with Mary Shores. In this episode, Mary is joined by Roxie Olivero-Winfield, the training manager at Midstate Collection Solutions, to talk about the benefits of implementing weekly challenges to help collectors improve their consistency, confidence, and communication.
It is important to note that challenges are more than just setting a goal or target for how much a collector should collect in a given week. Challenges, as Olivero-Winfield and Shores discuss, are about getting collectors outside of their comfort zone and re-programming them to be more consistent, to collect with more confidence, and to improve their communication skills.
Olivero-Winfield talks about her experience with two collectors, Pam and Scott. Both of them were effective, but it was noticed that Pam’s payment arrangements were always for more money than Scott’s. And when they dug into finding out why, it was because Scott never asked for as much as Pam did. So Scott was challenged for a week to always start with the highest payment option when negotiating and they saw an immediate improvement in his performance.
Challenges help you “figure out like where does this particular collector need help, and then you level them up right there,” Shores said. “So, with Scott, he was really great about collecting payment in full. It was just his payment arrangements. And what I feel like is once he did the challenge, it’s like it makes the technique that you’re trying to teach them, it makes them stick in their mind. So it’s not something like that he did for a week, and then he stopped doing it. But it changes the way that they understand their work so that they can perform this over and over and over again.”
Weekly challenges, as opposed to ones that may last for a month or longer, are better at helping change behavior because it allows the collectors to make small, yet meaningful changes, which are easier to turn into consistent patterns.
“These challenges really show collectors that goals are attainable, and it may seem very difficult, but once they get in there and actually start experiencing these challenges, they’re going to see results that they just weren’t expecting to see,” Olivero-Winfield said. “And of course keeping them even more and more motivated to just keep going it really helps collectors create their own innovative and creative ways to collect.”
Check out all of the videos in the Training Bytes series, and get links to access the podcast version of each episode by clicking here.
