Faster availability of funds – no more lock boxes or delays in depositing. Safer because you’ll never see a bad check again – no more returned checks.

EASY TO USE: With Remote Deposit Capture (RDC), you simply insert the check into a scanning machine and it’s instantly deposited into your bankaccount. United TranzActions provides you with everything: a scanningmachine, processing software and full reporting at your fingertips.

News Release from Vicor Corporation sent to their NACM Affiliate:

“We are aware of fraudulent purchase orders purporting to originate from Vicor Corporation being placed with distributors of office electronics that lend themselves to easy resale (e.g., laptop computers, projectors, and network routers).  Please note our Internet address is www.vicorpower.com, and any email correspondence would originate from an addressing ending in @vicr.com.  It is not our practice to ask our suppliers to ship to addresses other than those listed as company locations on our website.  Given the volume of such fraudulent activity, we ask that recipients of suspicious purchase orders confirm the validity of such by contacting us at fraud.inquiry@vicr.com.”

Business Friendly

By Nancy Friedman, the Telephone Doctor

When you take the “friendly” out of Business Friendly, all you have left is business – business as usual. And we all know that’s just not good enough.So our new program deals with the tender subject of how to be Business Friendly. And it’s NOT just for the phones. Being Business Friendly is for all touch points of customer service. Any way you touch or reach out to your customers on the phone, in person, by email, voice mail, fax or snail mail, we need to be Business Friendly.

First of all, you may be asking yourself, “What the heck is Business Friendly?” Well, it’s the middle ground between being too cold, impersonal and uncaring, and the other extreme of being too over familiar. We’ve all experienced both I’m sure.

Here are the five points in delivering Business Friendly customer service.

Every Call is Unique – Don’t Become Desensitized: The transaction you get at the end of the day needs to be as upbeat and helpful as you were with the first one of the day. What happens is often times we get the same questions over and over and it’s easy to become desensitized. We need to remember that to the customer, his question is new to him. And it’s the first time for him; no matter what time of day it is.

Solve the Problem – Don’t Argue: You know the old saying “the customer is always right.” Well, at Telephone Doctor we’ve changed that around to “the customer always thinks they’re right” and that’s the perception we need to deal with. There are indeed times when the customer is wrong and we as service specialists know and realize it. Of what value is it to tell them “Oh Mr. Jones, you are WRONG.” None is there? So focus on the problem; don’t worry about whose fault it is. There is zero value in arguing with a customer. Don’t even get in the ring with them. You will lose every single round. Focus on solving the problem.

Show Empathy – Don’t Ignore What The Customer Says: The other day, I called a company and explained that the product they sold me wasn’t operating properly. The answer from the company representative? “Oh, OK.” AGGGGGG. That drives me crazy. First of all, it’s NOT OK that the product wasn’t working right. And secondly, where was a little empathy? Where was some sort of acknowledgement that they indeed heard what I was calling about. None. And you can have empathy in happy and good things too. Empathy isn’t only for disasters and bad times. You can join in when someone mentions a birthday, a vacation, a wedding, or anything that is happy. Point is, just do not ignore what they say. COMMENT on it.

Smile: Yup, the customer can hear it. We all know that. And since we all know that, we all need to do it. And by the way, smiling is showing your teeth. If your teeth aren’t showing, you’re only grinning – not smiling. Grins can’t be heard! Let those puppies show!

Avoid Emotional Leakage: What? Ok, what’s emotional leakage, Nancy? Well, that’s getting mad at Peter and taking it out on Paul. Not right, not fun and not fair. To take a negative thought or emotion out on one person and transfer it to another? Let’s show you how to avoid emotional leakage when one transaction goes bad and you need to deal with another one immediately.

• Take a deep breath
• Regain your professional composure
• Smile (Even if it’s phony)
• Then start the transaction

Being Business Friendly will make a huge difference in customer satisfaction. Don’t be cool and aloof and don’t get too familiar; be the middle ground and deliver Business Friendly customer service.

Reprinted with permission from Telephone Doctor, Inc. Based in St. Louis, Telephone Doctor is a customer service training company offering DVD courses, web-based training, keynote presentations and on-site workshops.  Contact them at www.telephonedoctor.com

Collection Do's and Don'ts

Over the years (and more often than not by trial and error),  I have learned what often / frequently / usually works well, and what does not seem to work as well when making collection calls.  Here are some of the things that I have learned along the way:

• Be assertive in your collection calls. Don’t become aggressive.  Aggressiveness is unprofessional.
• Never apologize for bothering a delinquent customer by calling for payment status.  Instead, begin your call by asking when a check for the past due balance was mailed.
• Always ask for the status of the entire past due balance.  Do not ask only about the status of invoices that are over a certain number of days or weeks past due.
• Keep the promises you make to a customer.  For example, if you promise to release an order based on a commitment by a customer to pay the past due balance — even if you regret your decision after the fact, you still need adhere to your promise.  Your regret will remind you to think carefully before reaching any agreement with a delinquent account.
• Don’t bluff; say what you mean and mean what you say.  For example, if you tell a customer their account will go on hold if payment is not received within 7 days, you must follow up on that commitment.  If you fail to hold orders, you will have seriously damaged your credibility with the customer and will find it difficult to obtain reasonable payment commitments from them in the future.
• Keep your sales department informed about collection problems involving their customers.  Salespeople have a vested interest in making certain that invoices get paid and new orders get shipped rather than held.
• Do use the telephone as your primary collection tool.  Don’t rely on written reminders, dunning notices, faxes, emails or instant messages.
• Remember that written reminders work well only with creditworthy customers that have inadvertently overlooked one or more past due invoices.
• Expect to receive payment in full for the entire past due balance from every customer and on every collection call.
• Don’t give the customer an excuse not to pay you.  For example, never start the conversation by asking if the customer needs a copy of an open invoice.  Doing so provides a handy excuse for that customer to delay payment even longer.
  Consider offering cash discounts as a way to accelerate cash inflows.
• Don’t permit unearned cash discounts.  Doing so is an invitation to the customer to continue to take larger and later unearned discounts.
• Take time to document payment commitments in a letter or fax when negotiating with a customer that has already broken one or more payment commitments.
• Create or use a handful of templates to complete routine correspondence quickly. Be sure to ask for the full name and title of the person you speak with in the debtor’s accounting department.  Keep that information on file in case you need to follow up.
• Don’t leave voice mail messages except as a last resort.  Chances are good that the customer’s A/P department will not return your call.  As a common business courtesy, you will almost certainly wait [waste] at least one business day before making a second call.  A better option would be to find out when the person you need to speak with will be available and call back at that time.
• Don’t forget to allocate a certain amount of time to addressing and resolving smaller older balances.  Collection success rate drops dramatically once account balances become more than 120 days past due.

Michael C. Dennis is the author of several books including “Credit and Collection Handbook.”  He can be reached by e-mail at:  michaelcolindennis@gmail.com. Michael will be teaching a Bulldog Collection Webinar on April 21, 2011 at 12 noon Pacific Time.