Digital Debt Collection Strategies with Kristyn Leffler | Ep. 232

Adam Parks (00:08)
Hello, everybody. Adam Parks here with another episode of Receivables Podcast. Today, I have got, I want to say a fellow nerd with me who really understands how these things work in the debt collection industry when it comes to the technology, the communications and the application of marketing to our debt collection processes. So today I'm joined with Kristyn Leffler. How you doing today, Kristyn?

Kristyn Leffler (00:30)
Hi, good morning, good afternoon, whatever time you're listening to this. Thanks for having me, Adam.

Adam Parks (00:34)
I really do appreciate you coming on. was I got to meet you really for the first time at the TransUnion Advisory Board session and watched you present on ecommerce and debt collection and what that intersection looks like. And I said, here is somebody who understands what I'm trying to say to the industry. So I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your insights today. But for anyone who has not been as lucky as me to get to know you a little bit, could you tell everyone a little bit about yourself and how you get to the seat that you're in today?

Kristyn Leffler (01:02)
Sure. Kristyn Leffler. So I'm currently Vice President Strategy Integration and Analytics at Resurgent Capital Services. So large debt buyer in the space. I am in my 13th, started my 13th year at Resurgent. I've had a variety of roles from analyst, started as an analyst, spent a lot of time doing that, managing analyst, did some inventory integration, played a pretty big role in our purchase of the SquareTwo portfolios.

And then for eight years spent time building out Resurgence digital presence. So what is email? What is text messaging? What does the portal look like? And how does that work in the debt buying environment? Also spent about just shy of six months at a digital debt collection agency recently before rejoining Resurgence again. So in my current role, I'm actually spending a lot of time in what I think about as the analog channels and what I think everybody else thinks about as the phones.

So this is an area where though I have been in the industry for the better part of a decade and a half, I really didn't spend a lot of time on the phone. So now I'm really excited to kind of bring what I know from all of the e-commerce space back into the traditional space and how those channels really can compliment each other. So that's kind of like my backstory and where I got to where I am today.

Adam Parks (02:21)
That's fantastic. And I'm very interested to have this conversation because those worlds are starting to come together and we're seeing although more adoption of text messaging and email as channels. But I don't think that the industry is really optimizing those channels and how those communications happen. And I don't think that we're learning from the Amazons of the world. And that's really, I think, what our future looks like over the next five to 10 years. And I know I keep saying five to 10 years, I think the reality is it's more like two to three.

Because with the application of artificial intelligence to some of these processes, it really does start to accelerate quite quickly.

Kristyn Leffler (02:55)
Accelerate.

Totally agree.

Adam Parks (02:59)
So from your perspective, when we talk about the debt collection process, and you've spent time in a couple of different channels, and you've been around for long enough to see some of the cycles here, talk to me a little bit about what you're seeing to be the future of the space and why you're focused on the topics that you're focused on today.

Kristyn Leffler (03:20)
Yeah, so I think about the collection space as obviously I spend a lot of time in the digital. So I'm kind of like anchored over in that direction. But kind of one of my major push points that I'm trying to push both internally and externally is thinking about our customers as customers and not as accounts, right? So as collectors, we are given portfolios, replacements from our creditors.

Great, those come with accounts, but in reality, we're not talking to accounts, we're talking to customers. And we need to think about those customers in the broader scope of the economy, whether that's from a macro environment. But typically, and this will resonate with everybody, customers typically have multiple accounts. And these are the same customers, in fact, who are, like you mentioned Amazon, these are Amazon's customers, these are Instagram's customers, these are Meta's customers.

It's not like our customers can totally isolate their financial existence from the broader e-commerce experience and from the broader experience of a consumer. So when you're thinking about how to engage with a customer, yes, they owe a debt. Yes, they need to pay it back. But you're not just competing against another bill that they might have. You're competing against Amazon.

Adam Parks (04:21)
you

Kristyn Leffler (04:38)
Every day when you're trying to reach your customer, you're competing against tech behemoths who have spent billions of dollars trying to figure out how to make their message resonate with customers. And if you're not doing something in that space, you will absolutely lose out a hundred percent of the market share. So do I think it is reasonable to, to compete against Meta or to compete against Amazon? No, especially not as an agency. You don't have the margin for that.

Kristyn Leffler (05:07)
But does that mean you should try to do something to talk to the consumer, to make your content engaging, to look more like an e-commerce company? I think it's not an option anymore. I think you have to go that direction.

Adam Parks (05:19)
It's about being an approachable financial institution these days. It's less about trying to be the big scary and more about the approachable. And you can see that just if you look at the websites all across the industry and the way that organizations online or the debt collection firms or companies online are starting to change their persona to try and attract that consumer and draw that communication or that engagement. Now, we may not be able to compete with the giant tech.

Adam Parks (05:48)
companies, but we can learn from them. I mean, even things as simple as an abandoned cart message seems to be a somewhat foreign concept to the debt collection world.

Kristyn Leffler (05:50)
correct.

Yeah,

right. You're totally right. We don't have to spend the billions. Someone else has already spent the billions. And not only that, they let their employees publish the research findings. All you have to do is ask your favorite LLM to say, hey, what did Meta learn this year about customer engagement? It's right there in front of you. Like they did, they spent all the money on your behalf. It's right there.

Adam Parks (06:20)
I think that's such an important point though. The information is there and available. So why aren't we looking at the e-commerce processes? We could send text messages, we can send emails, but ultimately if we're not pushing that consumer to a portal, at this point in time, we can't transact. So we send them over to the portal and how often does a debt collection company not even monitor that journey for their consumers? And I've done...

Adam Parks (06:48)
more than a handful of consulting calls just in the last month, talking with organizations about where are you actually sending that link to? How are you tracking not only the communication and the open rate and that click through rate, but what happens after that point and thinking about the e-commerce funnel. Now this was something that you really started talking about at the TU event that got me interested. Talk to us about how that debt collection funnel and that e-commerce funnel really are quite similar.

Kristyn Leffler (07:05)
for all funnel.

I think about them. this is kind of speaks to what we talked about there. think about anybody who's been in a business class or a marketing class has seen what the conversion funnel looks like, right? It takes a customer from awareness of your brand. We'll switch from debt collection to like marketing for a second. Awareness of your brand. Like, do you know who Nike is? Yes. Okay. And then, you know, consideration of your brand. Should I buy Nike shoes? I don't know. Let me do a little research. And then you have like,

intent, okay, I'm going to buy some Nike shoes. And then you go to the website and you think, this is a consideration. You're like, this one or this one, maybe an abandoned car email. You're like, you left these. Okay. And then you have your, you know, your purchase and that's the marketing conversion funnel. And every marketer is trying to improve the drop-off rates from step to step to step to step, because you can't get somebody to pay if they don't.

they're not aware of your brand. And that's where all these e-commerce companies have literally spent billions of dollars to try to optimize every drop off. How do I get customers more aware of my brand? I'll hire an influencer. I'll do product placement. I'll do direct marketing channels, whether that's, know, mail or email or text messages. And that's kind of the only space where debt collectors are playing today. On the debt collection funnel side, right, you have placement, contact, more contact.

Kristyn Leffler (08:35)
try to have some more contact. And then you have somebody who like commits to a payment and then hopefully they make the payment, but obviously it's some break, right? So I think about the digital debt collection funnel or the modern collection funnel as merging both of those concepts kind of interleaving them together. So you have awareness of my brand. Maybe that comes from an outreach. Maybe that comes from a credit report. Maybe that comes from a seller goodbye letter. However somebody becomes aware of your brand.

Adam Parks (08:36)
Another contact.

Kristyn Leffler (09:03)
You want that experience to be consistent. You never see like, we'll use Nike again, right? You never see the swoosh look slightly different. It is always the exact same swoosh. There are restrictions around what else can be around the swoosh. It is always standing out in golf is a good example. When Nike sponsors a golfer, there are no other logos around Nike. It is only Nike, right? So they have preserved that brand so that you always know if you see that symbol.

hey, this is their product, it's quality, you don't have to think twice about it. That's the awareness that we're after. So you go from awareness, then you have your contact, then you have your consideration, just like you do at e-commerce. And then you have, rather than, you know, I bought shoes, you have commit to a payment, and then you make a payment. So you bring those concepts together, and then you start to measure at each stage, how many people fall off, or preferably what percent of people fall off. Great, now I have,

I have something to manage. can't manage what you can't measure, right? So now I have something to manage. Okay, show me where the biggest points of drop off are. That's where I need to focus. For a lot of agencies, I think that becomes awareness in general. The only way they be customers become aware is from pushing outreach. They have no like brand identity. I think you and your management of lots of agencies, websites, I you would probably agree that has been a

Kristyn Leffler (10:28)
transition in the industry over the years. And then I think, again, I haven't seen everybody's funnels, right? But I would imagine the drop off from awareness to consideration is also very high because agencies aren't really managing customers like customers expect to be managed, right? Right now, if you think about, again, your Amazon, your Instagram brands, whatever influencer is showing whatever brand.

Adam Parks (10:28)
It's a challenge. Sure.

Kristyn Leffler (10:55)
Customers now expect to be targeted with ads. They expect to be handheld through every step of the conversion process. you left this. don't forget this. here's the discount code. Like you expect to get four or five emails a day from whatever brand. that I am, right. Not that I'm advocating collectors send five emails a day.

Adam Parks (11:12)
Whatever brand you recently considered or talked about.

Kristyn Leffler (11:18)
But expect to be handheld through that conversion process. can't retain, customers aren't retaining that they visited a website because they have now been coached by these technology companies to expect that someone will put it back in front of them. You don't have to remember what you were considering. Don't worry. Someone will put it back in front of you with a one click buy now button. Customers expect that regular outreach. And I think this is also crucial. Customers expect to be treated like a prospect, not like a debtor.

They don't want any influence of shame. They don't want any influence of negativity. They want to be courted. How can you court your customers? That's what customers expect. So we have to come farther from the negativity of financial status and strain closer over here to what customers are expecting because we as an industry are not going to be effective in fighting

the giant wave of customer expectations and sentiment from our little perch in the duck collection industry.

Adam Parks (12:19)
And like you mentioned, it's a competitive environment because a consumer that has an account rarely has one account. So if they're in charge off or there there's accounts post charge off in collection, the probability of there being multiple accounts is very high, which means you're not only I mean, in your case, you're competing with yourself as well as competing with others. But for most debt buyers, agencies, law firms, like you're competing against each other for that payment, who can develop that trust and hold the hand

Kristyn Leffler (12:34)
Very high.

Adam Parks (12:49)
the right way, right? And it's not too much. It's not too little. Like, I don't want to be all Goldilocks about it, but you're trying to find that like happy medium on what you're trying to do here because we're not an ecommerce brand. We're not an Amazon. We're not selling them something that they're going to get tomorrow at their home. It's not a live product. And so it's a little bit tougher to sell the intangible, but you're competing against each other for that intangible sale, which is increasing that difficulty. But

Kristyn Leffler (12:50)
Yep. Yep.

Sure. Sweet spot.

They want. Right.

Adam Parks (13:19)
Also, optimizing sooner rather than later gives you a significant competitive advantage in that.

Kristyn Leffler (13:25)
Yes,

yes, I still think there is the window is closing, but I think there is still a small window where you can do investments in this space and still eke out a competitive advantage. But that won't be the case in two or three years, I think. think there's a small window and it's closing.

Adam Parks (13:40)
I don't disagree.

It I think it's a very small window for rolling out a truly optimized organization. And there's so many different legacy tech stacks that I think are the biggest limitation to a lot of organizations. And even from the webinar I did with Michael Lamb recently talking about the M&A marketplace and what that looks like over the next 18 months, I think it continues to rise as organizations are sun setting.

Adam Parks (14:07)
core technology for organizations that have been on those platforms for 20 plus years. They're not necessarily sure where to go next or what avenue to take. And I think that that's gonna cause some confusion. And with that level of tech lift for those that maybe are not as tech savvy, if they haven't been keeping up with the times, are really gonna start thinking about exiting and creating a landing for themselves to exit.

Adam Parks (14:33)
So I think we'll see more of that mergers and acquisitions there, but how do you see from a competitive standpoint for those organizations that are ready to be competitive and compete for that next payment from that consumer, court the consumer, so to speak, what action items do they need to start thinking about in order to get there over the next 12 to 18 months?

Kristyn Leffler (14:55)
Yeah, I come from an analyst background. So like I always kind of go to the route, which to me is the data. Do you have information? So I guess maybe I'll start at the top and then go to the route. So if you want to be able to court the customer, you have to be able to know what it is that the customer is experiencing at any given point in time, right? Hey, did the customer engage with this content? Did they see my message? Do they know that I'm trying to get in touch with them? Have they responded positive, negatively?

because that helps you craft the next message that kind of leads that breadcrumb, which is what the e-commerce companies do. Hey, what's the next little breadcrumb? How do I lead them on this journey with me? If you don't have the data for that, if you haven't been tracking this information, which I think comes to your point on the legacy systems, do your legacy systems give you this level of granularity, the data granularity, and is it at the customer level? it at the...

I call it the channel resource level. Is it at the client level? How does this data come back to you? And can you slice and dice it in such a way that you are able to craft a communication for that customer that is compelling? If you don't have that data now, then you need to spend and invest your time doing that so that you can build the system on top of the data. If you don't have the data, you can't build the system.

Adam Parks (16:08)
So looking at your structured and your unstructured data, what data sets do you have within your organization? How is it and where is it coming into your systems and how can you even prepare that to be? Yeah, and how do you start to prepare that for what I think the next layer will be was the application of artificial intelligence. But if your data doesn't make any sense and there's no structure to it and it's in a secret language that only your organization understands, and that is definitely when it comes to collector notes, like that's.

Kristyn Leffler (16:15)
I need to correlate it.

Adam Parks (16:36)
always been a challenge across the entire industry. So how do you start doing that? I think the idea of getting out in front of the data is very important.

Kristyn Leffler (16:44)
Right, Collector notes are a great example. They're a wealth of information, but only if you have like the secret decoder ring, right? And I think, I think there's, maybe this will reveal me as a dinosaur. I think there's some, some hypothesis out there that you can just take it all and dump it into your favorite LLM and just the insight magically appears. I don't think that is the case without still knowing the secret decoder ring because you, you still have to.

Adam Parks (16:51)
Yeah, exactly.

Kristyn Leffler (17:10)
You still have to have something to unpack the structure and the key. Will you get some insights? Yeah. Will they be robust enough for you to build the next layer of your application on? I don't think so.

Adam Parks (17:22)
The larger the data set and the larger the process you're trying to run, the less accurate that process is. We've seen that. I mean, you can even just experience it with ChatGPT. Ask it to do 12 things and then ask it to do one at a time and look at the quality difference between what's actually happening. But I think you're right. I think that people do have this expectation that, know, the LLMs are magic and we're just going to take all of this raw data, we're going to throw it in there and it's going to find the insights for us. But I think just like leading

Kristyn Leffler (17:35)
Yeah.

Magic.

Adam Parks (17:50)
the consumer to the payment, right? Like leading them down the journey, we kind of have to lead the model down the journey as well for it to be able to understand and interpret the data set that's in front of it. But if you're trying to get it to interpret data and find that insight simultaneously, you are definitely not getting the same quality of responses back on the model by any stretch of the imagination. Feels.

Kristyn Leffler (18:10)
And which

is its own, its own branch of technology right now, right? Like I think you were saying you spent a whole bunch of time just on the prompt engineering piece. Like you can't, you can't as call it, call the agency owner, I'm going to dump my account notes in here. One, you have a security concern and you would spend an inordinate amount of time that a data engineer could help you with just to get to that plus then the prompt engineering.

Adam Parks (18:37)
And that that missing marketing piece and from what you were talking about your experience building out the digital channels and building out the digital online presence and journey managing that presence for an organization, but so few debt collection operators. I mean, the vendors generally will have somebody in marketing to help them bring in new clients, but you don't see only on the new business side.

Kristyn Leffler (18:49)

are doing it.

new, but only on the new business side, right? It's always, it's

always on like the, the go to market side, never on the, never on the, do I make more money side on the operation.

Adam Parks (19:05)

Agreed, but when we start looking at these these marketing channels, so few people even have a marketing person or marketing understanding, or I constantly see titles that are sales and marketing. I don't know about you, but I've never been able to do both. My MBA is focused in marketing. like real hard there, what would you what advice would you have for groups that are still trying to go down this digital path, but haven't established that digital

Kristyn Leffler (19:18)
Yeah.

No, no. Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Parks (19:39)
infrastructure or that reputational infrastructure? Like how do you, what advice do you have for people in that realm?

Kristyn Leffler (19:47)
I think lots of folks want to focus on, and I've seen people who've hired like, you know, a marketer and the marketer wants to focus on say, we're going to rebrand our templates or you need to like rebrand a new logo, whatever the case is. But I think that core, this is where it's really helpful to have the business context in addition to the marketing context. Like what is the thing that's going to drive your business? Hey, it doesn't matter how great your templates are. It doesn't matter if they get to your website.

assuming you're sending them to the website and they can't pay. So I think you got to start with your portal. You got to start with your portal and say, okay, how do I improve this experience so that it is well functioning? It's well running. And then only once you understand, like call it the funnel within your portal, then you can start throwing content out to try to pull people to the portal, but it doesn't matter.

if how good your email templates are, if when they get to your portal, they can't convert anyway, it's just a waste. It's a waste of time and money, right? So I say, you need, ideally, you have a dedicated business person in your organization. This can't be a side job. You need somebody whose full-time focus is on managing your reputation, managing what you look like to customers and your portal. Like there has to be an FTE. This can't be your dialer managers.

side job because it will never get enough attention. You need an FTE focused on what the digital experience is. And ideally, you have an analyst who can also help understand what those percentages are in the drop-off so then you know where to spend your resources. I think that's kind of where website analyze it and then drive traffic. That's how I think about

Adam Parks (21:09)

So for an organization that either does not have the analytical tools within their portal for that type of tracking, any advice for those groups other than find a new portal?

Kristyn Leffler (21:39)
I didn't do portal. think there, though you want to be able to have your call analytics close to the metal, right? You want to be able to know what's quickly within your portal. There are like broader signals that you could look at. Hey, what percent of my dollars are coming from my online presence? If you can't track every single step. But I think the farther away your metric is from what's actually happening on the consumer experience side, the more misleading the signal is.

Kristyn Leffler (22:06)
I've

heard lots of, I've heard lots of agency owners, you know, at different conferences say, oh, well, my portal is only bringing in 2 % of my revenue. So it's not even worth it for me to invest. I'm like, then your portal's broken. That's the answer. So I think that that can be a misleading signal and you get a new portal, work with your vendor. I know most people don't have the luxury of building your own portal exactly like they want it. Work with your vendor to understand.

Adam Parks (22:18)
Yeah.

Kristyn Leffler (22:35)
what could be available, what's on their roadmap to make available. Or I think this was a great, this was a great idea that came out of one of the arm tech sessions in January was, I get a coalition of other folks who were on the same software on this portal to say, these are the things that we want. are your top 10 customers. Here's, want, we want some influence on your product roadmap on what's going to be added to your portal. And here, you know, we want these five things tracked. Maybe that that's kind of the advice out to somebody who doesn't have full.

technical control over their website.

Adam Parks (23:06)
I look I think most organizations don't have technical control over their portals. And there was a time maybe five years ago where I want to say everybody was building their own portal. And I think quickly people realize that that's not a great

business model and requires entirely too many resources again, depending on your size, but for your average agency, I see the challenges there. I would tell people at the very least to try and get Google Analytics installed onto the portal and be able to start looking at some sort of a consumer journey and understanding at least how people are behaving on it because total traffic and logins and total payments are so far from each other in terms of understanding the friction that the consumer is experiencing.

Kristyn Leffler (23:21)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Adam Parks (23:45)
And I would always tell people to go pull out your phone and try and be a consumer from your phone because we've moved from desktop to mobile and we always check things on our computers and go, this looks great. But if 80 % of the consumers are using a mobile device when they're trying to accomplish the same process, are they having the same experience?

Kristyn Leffler (23:46)
Yeah.

Yeah, so true. not thinking about, I think maybe another good point is not only like the screen real estate when you're thinking about from a design perspective, but also like upload download speeds, right? Hey, are you something that's really intense on your portal? don't, you don't need to like autoplay a video. Like nobody cares if you're autoplaying a video. It's going to take forever for it to load. If a customer is driving, right. And they're bouncing around, make it simple, make it easy, make it navigable with thumbs.

Kristyn Leffler (24:31)
and make it a big button that says, hey. It's the color.

Adam Parks (24:35)
Yeah, with a color

that does not blend into the background.

Kristyn Leffler (24:39)
Yes, yes, accessibility concerns. It's a whole other branch, right? It's a whole other branch. And again, this is, again, lot companies have spent billions of dollars to optimize this. You don't have to start from scratch. Like everybody knows what the best practices are. should run one Google search or type it into your favorite LLM to ask, Hey, how should I build a good website? Google analytics is a great, is a great start. It's free. I think

Kristyn Leffler (25:04)
GA4 is a little more complicated than the previous iterations of Google Analytics. So it's maybe not as simple as it was to understand what's happening on your website, but still great tool. Yes.

Adam Parks (25:07)
Just a little, just a little bit.

But it's easier to find someone who can help you, right? Like when you're on

a platform that is as open source or openly available as a Google Analytics, at least you can bring in some help to start to design some of those roadmaps and how am I actually going to use this tool set?

Kristyn Leffler (25:30)
Yes.

Yes. I don't, you have more experience in this space than I, than I do Adam from working with different, different companies. When you're using a vendor portal, do you typically have the ability to install your own Google analytics?

Adam Parks (25:44)
No, but I find that if you're loud enough as a customer, they will make that available. And we've created partnerships with a few of the different portals to enable our clients to start building those roadmaps and understanding what's going on within there. And we're doing it as a third party, you know, going into it because we don't have a portal host a portal like we do the websites, but not the portals. But because we're also looking at that information as it comes all the way back from Google, because even getting that text message with a company name,

Kristyn Leffler (25:54)

Right.

Adam Parks (26:12)
A lot of consumers are not going to click the link or they're going to get an email. They're not going to click the link. The first thing they're going to do is search the company branded keyword in Google and try and figure out who they are. So we spend a lot of our time doing SERP saturation and trying to control all of those results and keep the ambulance chasers out of that mix by creating that positive content to push down the negative. So we spend a significant amount of time. But from an analytical standpoint, I want to see all the way back to what was that Google search query.

Kristyn Leffler (26:18)
Of course. Yep.

Adam Parks (26:41)
so that I can understand are they searching resurgent, resurgent capital, resurgent capital services? Like what are they actually searching and what branded keywords do I need to be focused on for all of the content that we're creating? how, and honestly for me, it's how am gonna leverage YouTube because Google never provides a fair playing field for anything. They own YouTube and my YouTube videos will show up in search results all the time.

Kristyn Leffler (26:44)
Yep. Yep.

Push. Yeah, because

they're pushing video.

Adam Parks (27:07)
Right. But if I load it natively somewhere else, it's almost never going to show up directly within a SERP. So for me, or search and result page SERP. So for me, I like trying to leverage all of those tools and how much real estate can I play with on the internet to provide that SERP saturation and provide that protective insulation to the debt collection operation. Because as debt collectors, we never get a fair shake.

Like we just we live in a world of it not being fair. I mean, one year we had 36 Twitter accounts get suspended for posting American flags, right on Memorial Day nonetheless. So like, we've gone through this experience for so many years. And I think that's why early on, you 15 years ago, 20 years ago, when I was starting this company, debt collection agencies did not want to have a website because they felt it was better to just not be seen at all. And it correct.

Kristyn Leffler (27:32)
Right, right.

stick your head in the sand, right? But it created an information vacuum. That's

that we had that same discussion here, you know, probably probably eight, 10 years ago, similar, very similar discussion. Like we don't, we don't want a presence, but you can't, you can't be a B2C company without a presence. You must have a presence. You just have to control that presence. And I take it maybe one step farther than, what you're, you're saying, serp saturation. call it attention saturation, right? I want to be

Adam Parks (28:07)

can't ignore it.

Kristyn Leffler (28:24)
everywhere the customer might be so that I am easy to find and I am consistent and that no matter where you find me, you get that same experience, whether that means social, whether that means email, text messaging, calls, letters, like I want to be everywhere, everywhere.

Adam Parks (28:42)
I love that. I think that's the next layer up, right? The SERP is just very narrowly focused on one thing when you're trying to get that entire attention saturation, there's real opportunity there not only to brand yourself as a good organization, but also to provide content to the consumers about the value of having good credit. Like what does that actually mean in terms of dollars and cents in your life? What's the cost of your current bad credit? And how much more are you spending when you have to buy a car than the next person who

Kristyn Leffler (28:58)
Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

Adam Parks (29:12)
does not have those derogatory marks on their credit reports. But some of this is education.

Kristyn Leffler (29:14)
Right. When demystifying

the process, exactly. It's education, it's demystifying the process, right? Because there was that information vacuum, the delinquency to charge off to debt sale processes is not well understood amongst consumers. And unfortunately, the folks who are filling that gap are like, hey, let me fill this gap. And you're like, yeah, that's right. Yeah, that is how that works. And then at the bottom, they're like, and then here's your form letter to dispute every debt you've ever had. like, ⁓

Adam Parks (29:38)
Yeah, every single

one of them has either a form letter or is directly trying to get attorneys to sue instead of paying a debt that's rightfully owed. And if you read the fine print on some of those websites and you actually read through that content, which I spend a lot of time doing, they are quite literally just like, hey, you may owe the debt. Doesn't matter if you owe the debt. We should sue instead. And that's why I call them ambulance chasers and not consumer attorneys. If they were real consumer attorneys protecting consumers, I would have a different attitude.

Kristyn Leffler (29:46)
Yes, yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Right, right. But they're the ones who are putting out the reasonable content, right? And they do have an army of SEO folks who know how to get it to rank. And this industry, you know, outside of yourself does not.

Adam Parks (30:21)
I'm the only person that I'm aware of outside of companies that have an internal person that's actually out there fighting the battle day to day, which is why when I saw your presentation at the TransUnion event, I went, my God, somebody, somebody else is doing this, because the remarketing and the ability to serve ads in starting to look beyond just the search results is what I feel the future looks like. But having that conversation is often difficult for me because either there's a lack of understanding or there's a

Kristyn Leffler (30:29)

Somebody get that.

Yeah.

Adam Parks (30:50)
lack of attention to it, not feeling like it truly is that next layer of the future in what we're going to be walking into over the next three to five years.

Kristyn Leffler (30:51)
resistant.

Yeah.

Yeah. How are you seeing if you have, is like treading in your secret sauce, you can cut me off. How do you see the future of SEO in the age of AI, right? Like how do you have to change? How do you have to change what your approaches to publishing content in order to be surfaced when customer switches from searching in Google to just searching natively in Claude or Chat GPT or Perplexity, right?

Adam Parks (31:03)
Sure, let's do it.

⁓ I like that one.

Yeah, or Perplexity or any, right? Like, or

any of those AI search engines, which I do believe are going to start giving Google a run for its money, especially on an international scale over the next probably two years, maybe, maybe less, maybe more. It's all about the infrastructure and is the infrastructure readable? So when we talk about building websites, we always talk about

at least internally on my team, we always talk about the schemas. And what I mean by schemas is like there's a specific set of code around the about information. There's a specific set of code around FAQs. There's a specific set of code around organizational information, specific set of code around logos. And understanding what all of those schemas are and being able to communicate it because what the AI tools are doing is they're looking at how the websites are trying to communicate to Google today. And they're saying,

Here's what these things mean. Now the AI may be a little bit better at understanding what a picture is because Google can't see a picture. Like the Google spider has no idea that what the thumbnail of this podcast actually is. The only thing that it knows is the alternate text that I provide in the background to say this is a picture of Kristen Leffler and Adam Parks having a conversation about technology.

Adam Parks (32:36)
I think the AI will be a little bit better at that and being able to interpret those things, but I think the fundamentals of website development, the fundamentals of the social media postings even and putting alternate text on the thumbnails on LinkedIn, for example, I think the battle is going to come down to the details. And we've already started showing up in ChatGPT searches, we've already started showing up in Perplexity and Claude and others.

Kristyn Leffler (32:47)
Yeah. Yep.

Adam Parks (33:02)
And I can see it even from a Google Analytics perspective or with our other analytical tools, I can already see that we're starting to rank there. So we start looking at those pages and saying, what are we doing well? Okay, let's start to go through it because we've got more web traffic information for debt collection companies than anybody else on earth. So like we have the data set to start digging through it. And I do believe that that is going to be a change that we're going to be facing.

Adam Parks (33:31)
Like I was doing a search, trying to find a place to go on vacation in Brazil and like what beach town do I want to go to? And I didn't go to Google. I went to ChatGPT and I had a conversation with the ChatGPT model for 30 minutes while I was making dinner and I identified eight different neighborhoods that are within a two hour drive, six cities and all of that happened with.

Kristyn Leffler (33:42)
Yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

Adam Parks (33:55)
I feel like less interaction in a more natural conversational way, which got me to my end result faster. At the same time, my wife was doing Google searches and trying to come up with the same thing and definitely did.

Kristyn Leffler (34:05)
You got to click them all

and then go read through it. Click it. It's just in a more efficient process. And I think especially when somebody, if you think about like, again, put yourself in the customer's shoes, right? This is a stressful situation. I want real quality information. don't want to have to click. I'm already like anxious about it. I don't want to have to click and read and try to figure out what's real and what's not. And as long as you can get into the quality data set, the LLM is going to say, okay, here's, this is reasonable. Here's this information. Here's how you can pay them.

Adam Parks (34:10)
shorten it.

Kristyn Leffler (34:32)
but you have to make sure that you're surfaced over there because customers are already probably putting too much trust in their favorite LLM.

Adam Parks (34:40)
They are putting too much trust in there, but that is where they're going now to try and get good information. And if that's where they're gonna, we have to meet them where they are. Look, just like we talk about Opti-channel and we have to meet them where they want us to meet them at the time in which they want us to meet them on the right channel. How is this any different? I mean, we're ultimately facing the same challenge. It's just a new channel, you know, a new channel.

Kristyn Leffler (34:44)
Yeah. Seems unbiased. Exactly.

Yep.

It's no different, just a new channel.

Adam Parks (35:03)
And then as we were talking about, as we were prepping for this, like what comes next? Like phone calls were 100 years, know, emails will be strong for 15, where text messaging, like, okay, what comes next? And there's different options out there. There's the spatial computing, and that's kind of where I'm putting my eggs right now is like what happens in the spatial reality part of the world. I don't think like the Apple Vision Pro is gonna be the particular tool set.

Kristyn Leffler (35:13)

Yeah.

and I'll be all. ⁓

Adam Parks (35:30)
But like, it's a little big

and quite ridiculous when I'm walking around with it, but.

Kristyn Leffler (35:34)
Well, you saw OpenAI just bought Johnny Ike's company. So like they might have some sort of wearable tech that becomes like now we're totally new place. It's some sort of wearable, but it hasn't even been invented yet, right?

Adam Parks (35:48)
Google just rolled out their Android XR glasses two days ago. And Meta's got their glasses that I was having the ChatGPT conversation with while I was cooking. So I think all of these are gonna start to play a game.

Kristyn Leffler (35:52)
Yeah.

Right. It's wild. I haven't spent

time there yet. I haven't spent time there yet. ⁓ like a little bit scared. I'm gonna go deep. ⁓

Adam Parks (36:04)
Or you're gonna go deep. You're gonna go deep. You're gonna go deep down the rabbit

hole. I'll tell you what though, the next time we're at a conference and we're gonna be there at the same time, you let me know and I will show up with the wearables.

Kristyn Leffler (36:11)
Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.

I think the other, maybe we'll leapfrog, maybe the deck collection industry will just be able to leapfrog this one entirely, but go talk to your collection floor, especially if you have some younger folks on the collection floor. I hate to make it an age thing, but they don't use Google. They just look everything up on TikTok, everything. And I don't know a deck collector who's on TikTok.

Adam Parks (36:31)
How fast did Reels?

Well, and we have a ban internally for having that on any of our devices, but Reels have become a massive part of my marketing and all of the Reels that we'll create from this podcast drive that. But how quickly did that happen? And then how quickly was it adapted into the business environment as well? Because half the people that are gonna see this as a real are gonna see it on LinkedIn.

Kristyn Leffler (36:39)
Yeah.

so fast.

Yeah, I know. It's that like strange like reposting from cross platforms. Half of my LinkedIn feed is like just blow ups of Twitter posts. Like if I wanted to go on Twitter, I'd be on Twitter like X, sorry, X. Like I want the native content in the native platform, but that's just not the reality. You can't control that. have to meet customers where they are.

Adam Parks (37:05)
What?

whatever you want to call it today.

But I'll tell you what those those social channels are directly watching whether or not the content you're posting is a reposting of a third party platform or native to their platform. My native LinkedIn articles are native real posting is doing fantastic because LinkedIn likes to keep people on their platform as does every social media.

Kristyn Leffler (37:26)
yeah.

Yeah, of course. Of course. Of course. It's

not a fair, it's not a fair playing field, right? These companies control, you control the platform, you control the medium, you control the communication, you control the narrative, right? So you play, play by the rules of the game. Google owns, Google owns email, play by the rules of the game. That's it.

Adam Parks (37:58)
I

also like to remind everybody that if you're not paying for it, you are the product. So like if you're not paying for ChatGPT, if you're using Gmail for your email and you're not paying for it, you are the product itself.

Kristyn Leffler (38:02)
100%.

Absolutely,

Adam Parks (38:11)
I could talk to you for hours about this, Kristyn and I really want to thank you for coming on and sharing your insights. This has been an absolutely fantastic conversation.

Kristyn Leffler (38:13)
Hahaha!

That was my pleasure. was

my pleasure. Likewise, I could talk about this forever. I'm so glad we got to have the chance to meet at the cab. And I'm so glad that we got to have this conversation. I look forward to many more.

Adam Parks (38:27)
I think we're gonna continue this conversation out into the future. For those of you that are watching, if you have any additional questions you'd like to ask Kristen 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, and I'm sure that there's a few of them out there, you can leave those in the comments below as well. And let's just hope that I can get Kristen to come back at least one more time to help me continue to create great content for a great industry. But Kristen, this has been so much fun. I really appreciate you.

Kristyn Leffler (38:47)
you

Likewise, thank you. Thanks to everybody.

Adam Parks (38:57)
And thank you everybody for watching. appreciate your time and attention. We'll see you all again soon. Bye.