Adam Parks (00:07)
Hello, everybody. Adam Parks here with another episode of Receivables podcast. Today I’m here with my good friend, Brandon Lane here to talk to us about the human side of the debt collection industry. And with everybody getting so excited about artificial intelligence and all the great tech that we’ve been able to build over the past couple of years.
We can’t lose sight of that real value, which is that human engagement, that human interaction, and how can we use these technology tools to improve the quality of the people that are performing the services? How can we create that super agent using the tech versus having this expectation that the voice bot is gonna be the future of all call centers? So Brandon, thank you so much for joining me today. I really do appreciate you coming on and sharing your insights today.
Brandon Lane (01:00)
Absolutely man. Thank you. I appreciate it as always us always good to connect. So, you know, thanks for contacting me and getting something scheduled.
Adam Parks (01:08)
Absolutely. so for Brandon, for anyone who has not been as lucky as me to get to spend some time with you through the years, could you tell everyone a little about yourself and how you got to the seat that you’re in today?
Brandon Lane (01:13)
Sure, sure, sure. I am currently, I am Executive Vice President at First Credit Services. We’re a BPO company. I started my journey about 25, 26 years ago. I started at a company called Apply Card Systems, late 90s as a part-time collection agent. I worked after school from like four to eight, four to nine, and I did that for about four years. Did that through college. And then I went on to Phillips and Cohen Associates. I worked there for about another four years as a commission collector. And then I went over to, I moved to Georgia. I worked for a few of the banks, Bank of America, Chase.
Spent some time there and then I went to a company called Focus Receivables Management, which is now Sequium as a manager. So I started my management career or the management leg of my career there. So I was there and then I ended up in Vegas at PRA. So I led the site there for about a year and then I went to Credit One bank another bank kind of bounce- bouncing back and forth between first party and in third party throughout my career, but and ended there or ended up at a Credit One managing offshore collections so got you know, it was a amazing experience I got to travel a lot and you know see the different call centers and the way things were run which was just again just an amazing experience.
And then I moved to Virginia, which is where I’m at now. Um, and I’ve led off collections for a CKS Financial. Um, I was there for about four years. Um, and then, um, I was recruited, um, at the company I’m at now, which is First Credit Services, the owner of the company CEO is a Raj Chhabria. Um, so I’ve been here for going on five years now. Um, so it’s been, it’s been, it’s been a fun ride so far.
Adam Parks (03:23)
Well, tell me a little bit about the organization and what it is that you do there?
Brandon Lane (03:27)
Yeah, absolutely. So we do, so we’re a BPO company. We primarily primarily focus is collections. We do digital first people and resources where we’re located in. We have offices in Columbus, Georgia, Piscataway, New Jersey, as well as two locations in Mumbai, India, Mumbai and Pune, India. We have a Spanish Spanish site there as well.
I my within my purview is compliance, client services and performance management and kind of client outreach and you know some of course in every small organization or smaller organization there’s some there’s some business development in there as well. So it’s funny I kind of do a little bit of everything you know we have a very tight senior leadership team executive team so you know, everybody does everything right now. It’s funny my my our CEO calls me his potato Just because you know, it’s versatile so, you know kind of use me for anything. So, you know, so it’s been a lot of fun around here.
Adam Parks (04:33)
Well, and you’ve had so many different opportunities to work in so many different roles through the years. And with all of the time that you’ve spent on the collection floor, being an executive management now probably gives you some really good insights. It’s real hard to know how to build a house until you’ve started hammering nails yourself, right? Like it’s just kind of part of the process. So as we think about this kind of leadership topic today and empowering people with the tech, I mean, you’ve got both onshore and offshore resources.
Brandon Lane (04:46)
Thank you. Yes.
Adam Parks (05:02)
What are you seeing in terms of the ability to empower those folks? Because clearly you’re not looking at technology as a replacement factor, but how do you look at empowering the people on your team using the new technology that’s available?
Brandon Lane (05:18)
Well, so I think, you know, I think the big thing is, so it’s different. So we see in our first party environment where we see a lot of development, right? It’s because it’s people, it’s all people, it’s no technology. You know, for our first party clients, we’re just the resource. So training, development, all of that lands with us. So we pour a lot into our people, the culture, the environment. I see a lot of that.
We do that extremely well. and in, in most places, and I’ve noticed this, most offshore, whether it be Philippines, India, you know, Costa Rica, Columbia, most offshore places, they, they, they really focus on that because again, that’s their primary resource, right? There is, is people, what we’re doing is more so leveraging the coaching aspect.
So your speech analytics, more of as a coaching tool, being able to work with agents, meeting them where they are and kind of developing on that side of the house. And that’s where you see a lot of it is just kind of that real time kind of coaching. But I think it’s important to differentiate coaching from monitoring, right? A lot of times we get wrapped up in, hey, that’s a call fail. You didn’t say X, Y, and Z versus Hey, let’s talk about how we can handle that differently. Let’s kind of toss out some different options or what are you comfortable with? What made you uncomfortable? Or why did you forget it? And kind of really understanding how that person got there rather than saying, hey, slap on the hand, it was a fail.
Adam Parks (06:34)
It’s a different animal today when we start thinking about that compliance monitoring number one, because we used to listen to let’s call it 5 % of calls. Now we’re listening to 100 % of calls. And so more is getting bubbled to the surface that potential problems and we’re probably getting a little bit more refined in what we’re identifying in the scale which we have to manage it across our organizations.
And as we think about the empowering that super agent, one of the tools that I’ve been reading about and I believe it was a Stanford AI report was talking about from a call center perspective that really two things really across all organizations, organizations, high performing AI organizations were 400 % more likely to have reworked their core infrastructure and their core workflows than organizations, you know, that were not performing as high.
And the other piece was related to call co pilot and trying to empower those agents with more and better information in real time to empower that agent to be the best that they could be. Have you had a chance to work with any of those technologies to this point?
Brandon Lane (08:00)
I’m glad you pointed it out, because as we kind of changed gears, I was like, that was a perfect opportunity, because we do use that. We use Agent Assist. And it’s extremely helpful, to your point. It really kind of helps drive the conversation, and kind of helps the agent kind of not, not necessarily from a compliance standpoint where it’s, you know, hey, check the box.
But more so from, hey, here’s some other options, some other things that you can say, or hey, ask this or hey, pitch this. Because a lot of times I think, I think back in the day, you know, was like not knowing what to say, not knowing the right, the right offer to give the customer. ⁓ But, you know, nowadays with this Agent Assist, you know, it’s listening to the conversation and it’s giving you offers that that could possibly fit the situation.
So yeah, we’re we’re we’re using that especially on our first party side. We use it on customer customer service as well Where we see it more heavily utilized on the CSI, but but yeah, it’s it’s an amazing tool we’re huge advocate for it.
Adam Parks (09:04)
I want to say it was about a 14 % lift as compared to other technology because we are always talking about the six use cases of artificial intelligence for the debt collection industry. And when we think about the voice AI piece that the voice bots are coming, it’s such a small piece. And I think that we get really excited about it because of the potential that it has to allow us to more deeply penetrate our portfolios.
But I think for those organizations that are looking at it and starting to think in the back of their minds that this is gonna be the replacement for the people in the future are probably barking up the wrong tree on some level. And I do think that we’ll see some impact from those tools, but it’s gonna be very important for us to be able to point the right consumer to the right tool.
And there was a National Bureau of Economic Research report that was done that basically talked about how the voice agents themselves did not outperform the live agents. But when you put the perfect connector behind it and you were able to direct the traffic to the right tool, whether it be an AI bot or a live human, that that’s where they saw an actual uptick in their ability to collect dollars.
And so I expect that we’re gonna see more focus on that workflow technology and trying to understand it because coordinating all of those digital communications, managing that inbound, that entire ecosystem I think is going to become more complex over the next couple of years. And that’s fine as long as we’re getting that consumer to the right resource, whether that be the AI bot or it be the live person.
There was also something else in that report that I found to be very interesting and they were talking about how it’s actually older folks that were more likely to talk to the bot because they most likely needed a reminder to pay the bill or that something was outstanding. Whereas the younger generation that although they may be more technically enabled or technically savvy or more comfortable with the digital communications were more likely to need some additional motivation in order to resolve their outstanding accounts and so that it was actually the live communications that was out collecting that digital side.
Does that all sound like it’s, you know, reality when you look at it and I mean, this was an economic, this was more of an academic study. I’m curious what you see on the ground actually operating with these folks.
Brandon Lane (11:32)
No, no, no, absolutely. I think it’s still really hard though to pinpoint who likes what, right? ⁓ Me, for example, I’m at heart of bill collective, right? So ⁓ I like to talk. I like to understand things. It doesn’t matter how informative the IVR is I still need to talk to somebody just, just to make sure we understand, you know, we understand each other.
So, that’s me. the same, I’ve got a 25 year old daughter. She’s the same way. She needs to have a conversation with somebody. and you know, it, it just kind of depends on the person. And I think, you know, the, the goal has been to, you know, just offer everything and see who responds to what and you know, sometimes, you know, on certain portfolios, it may, it may mirror exactly your sentiment, right? and in other portfolios, it’s completely different.
So I think now, now in today’s world, it’s, it’s just important to have the tools in place and then, let the customer determine, you know, where they want to go and just be able to service them if they want another channel. So, you know, it’s that availability that I think is the most important thing right now.
Adam Parks (12:50)
Being able to kind of feed both of those and we’re being able to resolve through whatever channel that the customer is ultimately looking for. So for those folks that are hell bent on the voice AI bot is the future, what advice do you have for them from your experience?
Brandon Lane (13:00)
I think ultimately technology improves efficiency, right? But people still determine performance, culture, compliance, and customer experience. So no matter what tool you throw at it, it’s only amplifying what you already have in place. I think that’s the long and the short of it, right?
If you don’t have that core infrastructure in place, you’re just not gonna, you’re gonna get outperformed by the agency that is able to do it.
Adam Parks (13:36)
They’re able to balance the tech and the people and execute on the performance. And one of the things that you admit, good.
Brandon Lane (13:40)
Yeah, no, no, no, it’s, funny. I had a conversation, um, with, with another, with a friend in the industry and we were kind of talking and I was like, you know, I’ve kind of been out of operations, um, direct operations for a long time. And I was like, do, do people, and this was probably, I don’t know, this was probably about eight months ago. And I was like, do, do people still drive performance? Like, cause at that point I just, I just wasn’t sure. Right. There’s so much focused on everything. Right.
And he told me a story and he was like, Hey, look, we were competing against an agency. and we were on top for four years in a row. we blew competition out of the water. And then all of a sudden there was a leadership change at our closest competitor and they beat us for the next six months. And we didn’t know what happened, but we asked our, you know, we asked our, our partner, our client, you know, Hey, what’s changed? Like we’re looking at everything. We’re looking under the hood, nothing’s changed on our end.
We’re still doing everything we were doing before. And they were like, they replaced their, they replaced their floor manager and their, and you the person over the program. So they made two leadership changes and completely turned things around over the course of the next six months. And you know, that, that’s kind of the thing that we, miss. We’re again, I think we’re, we’re kind of looking, sometimes we tend to look left when we need to be looking right.
Adam Parks (15:03)
It’s understandable, you had mentioned the challenges or the let’s say the lack of upward mobility for collectors compared to 10, 15, 20 years ago and how that has changed over time. Is there anything that we can be doing as organizations to to continue to encourage that type of upward mobility opportunity?
Because that’s, that’s a key to being able to capture and retain good talent. And so many of the agency owners out there started as a collector. And if that is starting to die, I think that also plays into some of the hiring challenges that we’re having for an industry. But what advice do you have for organizations that are maybe have not had that same type of upward mobility lately?
Brandon Lane (15:54)
Yeah, I think the key is really setting that career path, right? Having that career path in place to where there’s growth, there’s upward mobility. So then agents truly can start out as an agent and move into, offer those opportunities to where, hey, they can move into compliance.
Hey, they can, you know, they can move into accounting. I can’t tell you how many agencies I’ve worked at where, you know, the person over accounting now is used to be a collector on the phone and they weren’t the greatest collector, but they had all these other attributes that made them, you know, the best person in client services or, know, the best, the best person in accounting or whatever the case may be.
So I think it’s really, it’s really having the right leadership in place to identify, people’s strengths and allow those opportunities, or offer those opportunities, as opposed to just kind of looking outside, right? In all of our sites, we promote within. We don’t look outside first. We look in-house first to see if, is there anybody that can step up? And giving them that opportunity and truly spending time with them to develop them.
Oftentimes, at least when I was going through the ranks, it was like, you’re a great collector, you’ll be a great supervisor. And it was like, no, you won’t. If you don’t have those values in place and you don’t know how to speak to people, you don’t know how to coach and develop, you truly have to spend time with people and cultivate some of those great attributes that could be hidden.
Adam Parks (17:25)
And where do you find the time? Because that’s, I mean, that’s probably my personal greatest challenge in life, right, is time management. But as we’re looking at that, you know, who needs to be spending time with that collector? Is it one layer up? Is it all the way up to the top of the organization? You know, how do you look at that type of human time investment to make that reality?
Brandon Lane (17:29)
Well, so I think where it starts is senior leadership, executive management. These are decisions that that, you know, we make at the top and we set the expectation that, hey, this is our culture. And I think when you when you create a safe space for directors and AVPs and operations managers and team leads, that understand, this is the culture we promote within. We need to identify talent. We need to pour into talent. They’ll find the time, right?
It’s when you’re passionate about something and you understand that that’s your environment and that that’s the culture you’re in, you just do it. And when you hire the right people or you develop the right people, they find the time, right? I can’t tell you how many times my wife would call me at 10 o’clock at night because I’m spending time, you know, listening to calls or just trying to be better when I was directly in operations.
So, you know, you become passionate about things you care about. whether you plan to start out that way or not, it just it just kind of is what it is. So I think it starts at the top and it trickles down.
Adam Parks (18:40)
And how has culture changed over the last 10 years? Because it was, you know, I don’t want to call it boiler room in the early 2000s, but it was definitely a lot more energetic on the floors. And I know cultures as we’ve dealt with digital communication changes and drive toward inbound. You how has the culture of the organization and specifically in the collector realm changed?
Brandon Lane (19:02)
Okay. So, and because we’re a BPO, I don’t want to sound biased, but I can also speak from my time at Credit One where I managed offshore agencies. So going from an agency in Chicago and the floor kind of being quiet to go into an agency in the Philippines.
You know, there’s 300 people on the floor and they’re super excited and they’re you know, they’re yelling out payments and they’re ringing bells and there’s you know, there’s you know You know monitors everywhere on the floor where people can see when someone gets a payment So I think that still exists I think domestically we we kind of I think we I think we started investing in other things.
We started to be more concerned about investing in things that will make more money force and reduce the bottom line as opposed to investing in kind of that culture And you know it I mean look at you know, look at how we look at tech, right? If I can if I can hire several, you know virtual agents then I can reduce my cost here and you know if I can if I can trim off the top by sending digital communication because my cost is less, my cost to collect is a lot less, then I don’t need 15 agents. ⁓ But again, that’s kind of where you have to find that middle ground, I think. So.
Adam Parks (20:35)
That all very interesting. I don’t think it’s easy to it’s an easy challenge to solve. And as we’ve gone through these cultural changes, because it’s not just the collections industry that’s gone through these cultural changes. It’s the United States as the whole. It’s the entire workforce. It’s all the new people coming in that have these different expectations.
And I don’t think that social media has helped it all that much right with all the bad advice that they see on TikTok and Instagram related to financial services and debt collection and all of that, because there’s very little truth out there when it comes to how does credit actually work, right? How does collections actually work? Have you found that the, has there been any kind of major change in demographic over that time?
Are you starting to see a demographic of individual that has started to gravitate more towards the debt collection industry. I remember hearing the other day that collections is predominantly a female driven industry. And I wanna say that was an ACA stat, but I’m curious as to if you’ve seen changes to the younger or older, like how has the demographic of the individual that wants to engage changed over the last 10 years?
Brandon Lane (21:56)
No, it’s funny because I’d never heard that, but I never heard that stat, but it is absolutely true. Every agency, most agencies have visited or have been with, is prima-. I mean, even one of our sites in Georgia, I’d say probably 80 % of our staff is our females. It’s that way offshore. I’ve seen that offshore as well.
So that is that that’s extremely interesting. It’s it’s another another point I want to make because you you called out just about the United States changing I think that that also is one of the reasons why again, we can’t lose sight of people Just so much information on social media consumers are more informed regulations are tighter, you know customers expect empathy. They expect professionalism, right? ⁓ You know, these remote and hybrid environments, they make it a lot more difficult to manage.
So it’s definitely a challenge. I’ve got kind of a bleeding heart, because like I said, I’m a collector at heart, right? I don’t think that will ever go away. So you kind of have to care about both.
Adam Parks (22:44)
Fair enough. I think there’s a lot that can be done for the consumer when we care about the consumer. I still think is an underlying truth for everything that we do. And the best collectors that I’ve ever met were not focused on collecting dollars, they were focused on resolving accounts. Because whether it’s a payment collected, or we’ve identified that this is a bankruptcy or whatever the case may be, and we can get it resolved and moved forward, I think is one of the most important things that we do as an industry.
And so I guess when I asked the demographic question, I was curious as to whether or not we’d have more younger folks wanting to participate in the industry considering that like when we were young, we were on the phone all the time with our friends and like we spent a lot of time talking on the phone. And I feel like now we’ve moved more towards text messages and written communications and that younger generation may not be as comfortable on the phone.
I have nothing to support that other than just my gut instinct. So I was curious as to what you were seeing, you know, on kind of a global scale where you have offices on both sides of the world.
Brandon Lane (24:10)
Yeah. No, that’s another great question. So yes, I think there is something behind your thought. Absolutely. I think in any of the offices that we have, I don’t see a huge change. You know what? I don’t see the younger generation, was, is a completely different time, but I was 16 when I started, you know, started collections. You know, and I think that, you know, you would see 18 year olds, 17 year olds, you know, kind of kind of entering in the workforce.
I don’t think we see that anymore. ⁓ To your point, I think, you know, I think they’re more used to, you know, communicating on, you know, on social media and not necessarily having that conversation. I have two young, young daughters in their early 20s. So they hate, you know, they, for the most part, if they don’t have to get on the phone, they don’t want to get on the phone unless it’s my older one who’s an anomaly. But for the most part, they don’t want to talk to people. So a job that requires you to talk on the phone for eight hours of the day sounds like a nightmare. yeah, it just depends. It just depends on where you’re at.
Adam Parks (25:04)
Well, and I look at those demographic shifts, and it definitely where you’re at in the world, because my wife, for example, text voicemails back and forth with her friends, like she’ll speak to the phone and text a voicemail. I haven’t listened to a voicemail since 1996. So right, like if you don’t get me text me, and that’s pretty much how it works, or we’ve got a scheduled time.
And so I just start thinking about the skill set that’s truly required to be a successful collector and wonder if we’re, if we’ve got enough people and that’s why when I saw the the FTC proposed rulemaking related to offshore calling, I was really concerned because I feel like there’s there’s not enough folks in the United States that are going to be willing to take those jobs and the job still need to be done.
Because if we’re not collecting money, then one of two things happens either interest rates to borrow that money rise or the availability of credit shrinks and the underbanked community becomes even more underbanked.
And I think that there’s some serious challenges related to all of that. And even whether or not the new folks coming into the workforce are going to have the skill sets necessary. I remember a couple of years, took me, I went through many assistants a few years ago because I couldn’t find someone who could read cursive.
And they couldn’t understand what I was writing on both the whiteboard and in my notebook. And when I’d hand them that, they weren’t able to translate. it made me start thinking about some of those skills. Yeah, he, he, they just never seen it in school before. But if I’m writing on the whiteboard in cursive all day and you don’t understand what I’m writing on the whiteboard, then we’re going to have a problem.
Now there’s app one finally showed up and took pictures and had a translator app for cursive to what they would understand from a handwritten perspective. And that person ended up staying with me for some time. So there’s all different kinds of ways that it happens. But I’ve just been kind of curious about whether or not as a country, we have the talent pool necessary to support all of this because like especially with an organization like yours, it’s not just third party debt collection, it’s first party work, it’s customer service, CX type work.
And all of that is extremely important if we want to be able to provide customer support to anybody, no matter what, I don’t care if you sell widgets, right? It’s a, you need somebody to be able to provide that customer support and we’re going to need more bodies on the phones that are capable of answering it because I don’t believe that the voice AI bot is going to be the be all end all. think it’s going to be building that tech, deploying that tech to empower the people.
And I don’t think that we’re going to replace jobs so much as we’re going to empower those jobs and be able to handle more capacity on the same staffing levels. And I think that is a more appropriate focus next three to five years.
Brandon Lane (27:57)
I completely agree. completely agree.
Adam Parks (27:59)
This has been a great conversation. I wanted to see if there was anything else that we had not covered in this discussion today kind of on that leadership and people topic because it feels like we’ve gone down some rabbit holes today.
Brandon Lane (28:11)
Yeah, yeah, we have. I think we’ve hit our bases down to the off-shoring, which is, I think, a great place to end. No, absolutely. I enjoyed the conversation. I haven’t had this conversation yet. It’s kind of something I’ve been holding on to, very passionate about. So no, I appreciate the opportunity to have that dialogue with you. I respect you. Thank you very much so it’s great, know, great and talking it out. So I appreciate it.
Adam Parks (28:42)
I’ve really enjoyed our time together. And for those of you that are watching, if you have additional questions you’d like to ask Brandon or myself, you can leave those in the comments on LinkedIn and YouTube and we’ll be responding to those. Or if you have additional topics you’d like to see us discuss, you can leave those in the comments below as well.
And I’m hoping I can get Brandon back at least one more time to help me continue to create great content for a great industry. But until next time, Brandon, I really appreciate you. look forward to spending some time together at one of the upcoming shows this year.
Brandon Lane (28:57)
Absolutely. And thank you everybody for watching. We appreciate your time and attention. We’ll see you all again soon. Bye everyone.
Brandon Lane (29:13)
Take it easy.
