Adam Parks (00:06)
Hello everybody. Adam Parks here with another episode of receivables podcast. Today I'm here with a great speaker and long time friend, Mr. Bob Burnside, who is one of the best at taking technology and actually making it usable within an organization, which is a rare and unique talent. It's great to be able to sell someone a piece of software, but if you can't, operationalize it within their organization, then they're not getting everything that they should out of the product. So Bob, thank you so much for coming on today, sharing your insights with me. I really do appreciate your time.
Bob Burnside (00:46)
Adam, thanks for having me and thanks for listening to me. Anytime you need anything, I'm here.
Adam Parks (00:52)
as you always have been, and I really do appreciate your friendship. But Bob, for anyone who has not been as lucky as me to have the opportunity to work with you over the last 15 to 20 years, could you tell everyone a little about yourself and how you got to the seat that you're in today?
Bob Burnside (01:07)
Sure, no problem. Started off, almost 35 years in this industry. Started back in St. Louis a long time ago as a collector for GC Services. Went through their manager training program, became a unit manager, ended up going over to another local agency, CSE Credit, which became part of RMA later down the road. As a collection manager, became the general manager there grew the office from 17 collectors to 50. When RMA bought us, I had the fourth highest, even a percentage in the company. They then moved me out to their office in Phoenix, which at the time was the third largest regular collection office in RMA, but also their legal and pre-legal offices were there. RMA kind of went by the wayside, and I ended up in Atlanta. with First Financial Asset Management, Matt Maloney, John Maloney, Mary Maloney, et cetera. Started, I built a legal pre-legal department for them. And that's where I started getting into how does the collection platform work? I wanted to build my own legal scoring model for starting to call, do the pre-legal work, and then the legal, not just sue everybody, make my clients happy. And that's where I started teaching myself SQL and just all about analytics and how everything works and especially Latitude which morphed into my becoming the application developer on Latitude for FFAM on both the collection side and the debt buying side and that led to me going over to Stellar Recovery to do the same thing. I ran their debt buying department, bought their paper, sold their paper, but also was head of IT. That's where I got into IT security and taking them through their PCI DSS and ISO 2701 certifications, just kind of like a rock rolling downhill. And that ended up fast forward because of relationship with Rob Fite, who used to be at Lexis Nexis and some other places. He was at Telrock, which was just introducing a really, really great collection platform called Optimus. And he brought me over and I started doing new customer implementations. I was part of taking their first two clients live and a lot of work on their third live client. Moved from there over to products so could start working on optimists and defining requirements and needs and working with the programming staff, be it backend or UI, in getting the product improved and better and doing the testing and then working with QA to get their automated and their regression testing built. I also helped a lot with the pre-sales, going to conferences, doing demos, answering RFIs and RFPs, at the same time working with the implementation teams when they were working on new clients and still doing classes with clients to teach them the product. And unfortunately, due to their demise last Tuesday am now a free agent. But the biggest one is I work with and for a lot of great people. You, Matt Maloney, my boss, everybody at Tel Rock. There's too many great people to name and that's why I'm here.
Adam Parks (04:20)
Well, Bob, it's been a pleasure to have an opportunity to work with you when you were at FFAM and Stellar and other organizations through my career. You've always been someone that I've looked to as a technology professional. But one of the more interesting things for me has been your ability to understand not only the underlying technology, but to connect that and operationalize it within a business. Because it's one thing to go through a system conversion. And I think right now I'm hearing in the market plays more system conversions that are actively happening as we see end of life of Cubs and other programs. And so a lot of people who have been on the same system for the last 15, 20 years are now actively looking for these opportunities to engage new products and services. But the challenge of system conversions, I think is one that is always a problem. But then even once you've got the technology rolled over, Now it's about training and operationalizing within your business. How are you going to bring that together? So as you've gone through all of these different types of implementations with different underlying systems of record, what do you think the biggest challenge is in getting the team to actively be able to get the most out of a new piece of software?
Bob Burnside (05:34)
Couple things. One is just getting their buy-in. Showing them that we're not there to take their jobs. We're there to help make their jobs better and make life a little easier for them. And make life a little better for them. It's amazing when you're talking about a new system to an IT department and they all just, they hold up the garlic and the silver cross at you because they're afraid it's going to cost them their jobs. In reality, it's not. It's going to improve their job skills. The other one is teaching the people how to do it. It's the old verse of teaching people to fish rather than handing them the cod. That's my favorite part is working with the clients, teaching them how to configure the system, teaching them what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and looking at it in such a way that they can say, if I do this, then I don't have to take these 13 steps manually. The system will do it for me. And I used to hate doing that part. Now I don't have to. You've just bought their buy-in. So when doing training with a new customer on a piece of configuration, it's let's show you how to do it. Then I'm going to look over your shoulders while you do it, and I'm explaining it every step of the way of what you're doing.
Then you're going to go home for a couple days and work on it, some of it yourselves, and then we're going to come back in a couple days and do a peer review to see how you did it. And we're going to document it all the way, and we're going to record it all the way so that you have the comfort level of doing it. And it's, you're going from your 63 Ford to a brand new car with an info center, and you have to learn how to use it all.
Adam Parks (07:11)
That's a good analogy because it is quite literally that. I mean, I know a lot of organizations are moving off of right now in 2025, moving off of old school green screen and other, you know, just absolutely antiquated technology. And it is quite literally like going from a 67 Chevy to a 2025 Cadillac, you know, escalate with all of the bells and whistles and screens.
You're almost too nervous. You don't want to tell you ever jump into one of those rental cars where you're so nervous I'm like, I don't want to touch anything because I don't know what any of this does.
Bob Burnside (07:43)
Yeah. Or can I please have a master's class on how to do this?
Adam Parks (07:47)
Quite literally. What do you think the biggest mistake that companies are making right now is they're taking on a system conversion and getting their teams engaged?
Bob Burnside (07:55)
ones I want it just to do exactly like my old system did.
Adam Parks (07:59)
Such a great point.
Bob Burnside (07:59)
I'm going to spend, I'm going to go out and spend tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars on a new system and I wanted to do exactly what my old system did. That's the biggest one.
And, you know, I understand that. I really do. But yeah, that's the biggest issue that we've run into is, well, you know, the screen, my old screens were blue. Why is this one not? Or my old screen was green. Why is this one not? And why doesn't it work exactly like the old system did? And it's to get them to embrace the changes.
Adam Parks (08:12)
It makes a lot of sense. And what are some of the steps that you take with organizations to help get them to embrace that change and to feel like they're part of the system. You talked about empowering the people around you, getting their buy-in. What kind of steps can an organization be taking to improve and to smooth out that process?
Bob Burnside (08:54)
And you said it, you empower the people to be involved. If you just shove stuff at people, they're going to push back on it. If while you're going through something as simple as with a group of collectors, the collector workbench, the collector interface, explain to them why each piece of this works and what it's going to do for them. And show them how they're have to make fewer clicks with their mouse to get a promise in because what's recoveries and collections all about? Now explain to them and show them that if it's a vendor management that we can use, hopefully, your existing data layouts that go back and forth from your agencies so you don't have to put your agencies through the pain of going through a new validation sequence with a new vendor. So show them that it's not going to be as painful as they think. Get their buy-in. Get them involved in making the decisions on how things are configured and set up.
Adam Parks (09:54)
Now, do you normally look at this as a team training environment or these individualized training sessions and how do you differentiate that between the departments. The needs of IT, the needs of the collector, the needs of the executives are all very different. How do you reconcile that and prioritize those various functions?
Bob Burnside (10:14)
The hardest part of that or the biggest part is getting all that defined up front and then setting up training sessions so that you don't have 52,000 people sitting in them. If this is something that executives maybe want, that's fine. Someone else is to have to do the work to get it to the executives, but make sure you've got what the executives want. Make sure that the people actually doing the work know what it's for, know why walk them through how to do it. And it's showing them, and again, it leads back to, it's empowering them in the decision making. It's empowering them in being able to do it themselves. It's empowering them to know that they have a say in it how it's done.
Adam Parks (10:57)
That's interesting. I always think about the reporting aspect of all of this because as an executive, I look at dashboards and reports and I don't want to see big long reports. I need to be able to visualize the information so that I can digest it from my phone. And that's always the way that I think about it is can I do this from my phone when I'm traveling? As I'm here broadcasting from South America, it's always on my mind. How can I maintain as an executive more mobile? How do you work with the executive teams to help them better understand what they actually want and need in their dashboards and reports, because they all are going to have a list of things that they want. But how do you help them further explore that to get to what they actually need?
Bob Burnside (11:40)
Well, let's have to start, what are you getting today? Based on what you're getting today, what more do you want? Or what do you not want? Maybe your report has a bunch of stuff on it you don't need. So define exactly what they want and go from there and ask them, is this something you want to see on your phone? Or are you okay looking at it your laptop? And then also digging into there's two different ways people like to look at data. I'm a numbers person. I don't like graphs and charts all that much.
I'm the guy at the matrix from the matrix watching the data go down the screen where others I've worked with, I'll use Matt Maloney as an example, Matt loved graphs and charts. okay. Different strokes for different folks. So you have to define that too. And you got to be honest with people. Honesty is a beautiful thing in life. If you want this and you want 72 different points of data and
Adam Parks (12:22)
Me too. Yeah, it's all about prayer, like preference.
Bob Burnside (12:38)
on your chart and you want to open it up on the phone, you better get a really big phone screen. And it's amazing how honesty helps.
Adam Parks (12:45)
Good point.
Bob Burnside (12:48)
One of the biggest things we ran into at TelRock with implementations was clients would say, I want this, I want this, I want this. And a couple of our implementation folks would say, okay, even if it was not practical. And if you work with the client and push back, and I'm going to use a reference, a client wanted a dialer file that had 127 columns of data.
Adam Parks (12:48)
And you know, that's a really good point. What were they gonna do with it?
Bob Burnside (13:15)
They used six.
Adam Parks (13:18)
If I mean, that sounds a little bit more feasible and usable, but what drives someone to feel like they need that much more than they need? And how do you go through the process of actually convincing them of what their actual need is? Because it's not really convince them. Is it a walk them through the process until they get comfortable enough with what they actually need? Are you taking it away piece by piece?
They were complaining about how long it took to create, on their existing system, on the legacy system, how long it took to create the dialer file, how long it took to upload it to the dialer, because mind you, it was about 400,000 records.
And we recreated it and it took forever to run, just as we expected. And we went back to them and said, what fields are you actually using in the dialer? Well, these six. Then why are you uploading the rest? Well, because this person looks at the report and they wanted this and this person looks at it they wanted this and this. Okay, fine, build separate reports to send to them.
And it wasn't a big deal. It was actually very easy to do once we were honest with them and broke it down in a way they could understand.
Adam Parks (14:26)
But they started off by migrating massive sets of data into multiple locations and increasing the, it's called the risk surface area that they are ultimately dealing with as a business.
Bob Burnside (14:35)
Yeah exactly.
Adam Parks (14:40)
Scary thought, right, when you put it in that perspective.
Bob Burnside (14:40)
Yeah. Well, and that's something you have to do when you're doing an implementation. We were working with a client that, or they were now that they're closed, that had a hundred and something different letter files. They had a hundred and something different letters they sent out, and each unique letter type had its own file.
And we went to them and said, if you look at this, 94 % of the data is the same for every letter. Why not just take that other 6 % tack it on the bottom and just use one extract every day for all the letters? And they're like, oh, we never thought about that. The person who was here before just started building a new process for every letter.
I mean, do you think part of that is somebody trying to defend their world versus trying to solve a problem? Like, how do you think you end up in that type of situation to begin with? I it seems excessive.
Bob Burnside (15:33)
I think it's like with so many companies, we started doing it this way and we're still doing it this way. And nobody is being an active process manager to look at it.
Adam Parks (15:38)
Okay, that's fair. It's just a whole bunch of waiters and nobody's talking to the chef.
Bob Burnside (15:47)
Exactly.
Adam Parks (15:49)
Okay. Which, which is another set of challenges in and of itself. Because when you're doing these types of implementations, you have to find this balance between being the waiter and taking the instruction from the client and trying to show the client the best way to accomplish the end goal. How, how have you through your career gotten to the bottom line to be able to get people to actively partake in that process.
Bob Burnside (16:19)
Well, and there is a fine line there because you don't want to, for lack of a better example, say, well, for the workflow for handling bankruptcy, you should be doing this because then we're giving them operational guidance that could cause problems, maybe a lawsuit, something like that down the road. So we have to be careful with it. But most of it's just regarding data flow. And when you look at a data file that's 127 columns wide and 400,000 rows deep and you find out they only use six rows or six column fields. It's actually at the end of the day pretty easy. You just need to convince all the stakeholders of that and that there's a solution around it. Like create a different report off your data lake that you can email out to all the people who need this data. And that way you don't have to create this one that's taking six hours to create and then three hours to upload to the dialer company.
Adam Parks (17:16)
I used a phrase there that I don't know that everybody's familiar with. The data lake. Is that how you view your system of record as the, I mean, it's your source of truth within an organization, but do you view it as the data lake that is to be drawn from?
Bob Burnside (17:30)
No, my definition of data lake, most creditors at least have a repository, a database sitting somewhere that the data that is used by the post-charge-off management system, maybe from the loan origination system, loan management system, it's all stored in one repository. So that they can reference it for analytics, for reporting, things like that.
Adam Parks (17:47)
Yeah. Bringing together the data set to, basically bringing together a data set to stop siloed systems. you're kind of combining that data in a single location and being able to draw from the well, depending on what your need is at that particular moment in time.
Bob Burnside (18:14)
Right. And a lot of collection agencies have done it also, especially those on platforms like FACTS and CUBS that don't have the best ability to create ad hoc reporting.
Adam Parks (18:24)
Okay. And I think we're seeing more of this in terms of how organizations are building out their structure to create those reporting capabilities.
Bob Burnside (18:34)
You have to today. You've got to create the analytics. You've got to be more efficient today.
Adam Parks (18:40)
Well, centralizing that into a data lake or a data warehouse and then being able to snowflake, for example, and being able to run the AI ML models over the top, I think is, is part of that too. But I mean, there's a, even just in that there's a vocabulary challenge and trying to explain to organizations what, where, why, how they need these things in order to march forward.
Bob Burnside (19:02)
And there's been a lot of good education of that through, be it RMAI, the ACA, et cetera, your organization. There's been a lot of great new education on that that's helping even the smaller players in the industry.
Adam Parks (19:15)
Now, as we think about, you know, so we've talked about reporting and dashboards and, know, let's talk a little about the training programs. Is it all just a sit down and train? Are you leveraging learning management systems? You know, what is that training cycle or that training tool set look like as you're trying to help an organization deploy a new system?
Bob Burnside (19:39)
As the workforce is becoming, okay, I was going to say the workforce is becoming younger, but it's actually, I'm just getting older. ⁓ But as the workforce is getting younger, they're more visually, not motivated, but they take visual better than where when I learned how to use, what was it, GC services star system, and then cubs and facts and latitude.
Adam Parks (19:46)
think we all are.
Bob Burnside (20:02)
It was more sitting, flipping through a manual and figuring out how to do things. Today, I think for success, there needs to be more video representation of training. We still need manuals, but the companies that some companies I've looked at and seen their products, they're leaning more towards videos where people can sit and learn, okay, this is how I take a promise on this system. And they're using AIs of great for that because you can, if I'm a user and I don't remember how to do something and the system supports it, I could go to a system integrated AI portal and say, how do I take a below blanket settlement?
Bob Burnside (20:46)
So that's part of it also, but today companies need to go more video with their training. It still needs to be interactive. You still need to be taught how to do it. But in general, I think we've all gotten better at video learning than just reading the book.
Adam Parks (21:00)
I love creating the videos for training. also like using a tool like a scribe or something along those lines that allows me to create these step-by-step guides really easily by walking through a process once or twice, recording that process and then working our way through it. And I think that there's some really easy ways for us to be able to deploy that type of technology into the future and training people on even the simplest of tasks because collect, you know, good chunk of collector training is learning how to not just collect a debt, but how to manage some of these systems of record and navigate within the tools that that particular organization is using to conduct their business.
Bob Burnside (21:36)
It also helps on the back end for the CRMs and for the software providers because if I say your client reports a bug rather than me trying to go through the system and figure or going through the system figuring it out and then writing up this big long document of everything I did I can record the steps I took. can show I can then hand that off to a developer and say here's what I did. And a lot of the products too will then document each step for me. So that makes my time more efficient. That makes the developer's time more efficient.
Adam Parks (22:10)
Well, there's so many great tools that we have available today that we didn't have available two, three years ago. The ability for us to leverage, to record a meeting and then use a chat GPT or perplexity or Claude in order to summarize and organize that information in new and interesting ways to listen to one of the things that our team did, which I thought was really interesting. And we're just about to start deploying it for training was we took all of our sales calls from 2026. took all the transcripts, put it together, ran it through a model and said, here's how.
Adam Parks (22:38)
Our clients are actively engaging in our discovery calls and here's how we should change our order of operations on these calls in order to execute at the highest level and get people what they want in the shortest amount of time. I was dumbfounded when I saw it because to me it was counterintuitive in terms of the order of operations changing. I'd always done it the way that I had always done it, because it worked in my head and started to realize that maybe that's not how other people saw the world and had to rethink my approach to
How am I actively going to get people to engage in this process so I can create an impactful customer engagement opportunity? Because that impact is that hardest part, we can all do the things, but we have to be able to create an impact within the business. And training is such an incredible area for us to do it because how many features are they not even aware of in their own system, That some of these systems are capable of some really incredible things, but how much of it are you and your team actually aware of and what can you do to drive that type of engagement.
Bob Burnside (23:38)
You need to get the people excited about it.
Bob Burnside (23:41)
And what's more boring than learning a new collection recovery system as a collector?
Adam Parks (23:46)
That's my next question is how do you get people to become more engaged and involved in this process and make them feel ownership of it? I mean, I know there's some early stage things, but you know, we've got the system it's deployed maybe that that person or persons were not actively involved in the buying decision. How do you get them on your side after the fact and get them rolling with where the organization is headed?
Bob Burnside (24:11)
Regarding training in general, there are things you can do like when I'm training collectors on the environment that I use for it, I would change some of the words in it and I put almost like Easter eggs out on the workbench and everybody who caught an Easter egg got a piece of candy or a soda or something like that. So you can do little things like that. But again, it's showing them how it's going to help them because nobody almost nobody likes change. And if I'm a collector, sitting there going, you know, I should be on the phone making my bonus check.
Okay, well let me show you how you're using this new system and instead of having to use four drop-downs and click 18 times to get a promise and then move to the next account, you're going to make four clicks and then click OK and the promise is going to be there and then you're dialing. and by the way, the history has already done most of itself for you. And the scripting platform is going to show you what to say and how to say it.
Adam Parks (24:43)
Outro
Bob Burnside (25:09)
That also helps people come up to speed quicker and shows them they can be more productive more quickly, which helps them buy it in. So it's the attitude of the trainer having fun with it. And it's also pointing out to people how it's going to make their lives better. Collector, you're going to touch more accounts. You're going to make more calls. If you get a promise out of every four calls and we can increase the number of calls you take by 20%, that means you're going to collect 20 % more. What's that going do to your bonus check?
Adam Parks (25:37)
Interesting. I like that approach because you're getting straight to what's the desired impact of the end user. Commission check, bonus check. So what tools are we putting in place? How are we explaining it to them? And what opportunities are there for us to engage those folks in new and interesting ways?
Bob Burnside (25:55)
Yeah, customer service people or client service people, end of every month, it takes you, have to work until how late in the night to get all this stuff done, all everything out to the clients. Well, if we can automate it and we can do this and we can do that, we could get you home three hours earlier.
Adam Parks (26:10)
Well, time is the greatest asset that we are not getting any more of.
Bob Burnside (26:14)
That's right.
Adam Parks (26:15)
Very interesting Bob, Any final words for our audience on how they can start their process of creating a more impactful customer education program around their business?
Bob Burnside (26:28)
Listen to your customers, know your product, listen to your customers. Unfortunately, the customer is not always right. And you have to be careful about saying that to them. You can't tell them the baby's ugly. ⁓ But treat them right, empower them, make them part of the process, and everything will be fine.
Adam Parks (26:36)
You sure? to that. Well, Bob, great insights as always. I really do appreciate you coming on, sharing your insights, sharing your experience with our audience and helping us get a couple new ideas. I'm hoping everybody walks away with some new and interesting ideas and opportunities for how they can create those customer education platforms.
Bob Burnside (27:08)
I appreciate your putting up with me, Adam. Thank you.
Adam Parks (27:10)
Always my pleasure. For those of you that are watching, if you have additional questions you'd like to ask Bob or myself, you can leave this in the comments on LinkedIn and YouTube. I'll also be putting a link directly to Bob's LinkedIn profile, so if you have any questions and you want to reach out directly, you can reach Bob as well. But Bob, thank you again for all of your time and attention. I really appreciate your insights.
Bob Burnside (27:31)
My pleasure, anytime.
Adam Parks (27:33)
And thank you everybody for watching. appreciate your time and attention as well. And we'll see y'all again soon.
