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The Complete Guide to Becoming A Bill and Account Collector
What you'll really do, what you'll really earn, and whether you'll last a year — before you spend a dime on training
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: What Does a Bill and Account Collector Actually Do?
Welcome to the Phone, the Screen, and the Numbers Game
Let's strip away any mystery right now: a bill and account collector is someone whose job is to get people or businesses to pay money they owe. That's the whole purpose of the role. How you go about that, however, involves a lot more than just calling people and asking for money. It's a profession built on psychology, persistence, organization, and a surprisingly strict set of rules about what you can and cannot say.
Walk into almost any collections agency, bank call center, or hospital billing department and you'll see the same basic setup: a row of cubicles, each with a computer monitor, a headset, and usually a small mirror or a sticky note with a motivational phrase. The air is often humming with the low murmur of dozens of conversations happening at once. You'll have a dialer program open on your screen, a spreadsheet listing your accounts, a notepad for jotting down details that don't fit neatly into the software, and possibly a calculator because you'll be doing a lot of arithmetic on the fly.
Your primary tool is the phone. But let me be clear about how that phone works in a modern collections environment. Most agencies use what's called a predictive dialer. This is a software system that automatically calls phone numbers from its database and only connects you when a live person answers. When you