If you are on this web page, it means you need a debt collection agency. Someone is not paying what is owed to you and you are wondering if a collections agency is the right way to go. If you are spending time making phone calls and sending letters, faxes and emails, then you are spending money and not making any progress on your business debt collection. If your customer is ignoring you, then we can almost guaranty you that you will never get paid unless you use a collections agency or perhaps even a debt collection attorney.
Many debt collection agencies charge an upfront fee, but not The Kaplan Group. We are a commercial collection agency that works on a contingency basis, which means we only get paid if we are successful with a business debt collection. That means you start saving money as soon as you start using our debt collection agency because now we are the ones spending the time to get your money, while you spend your time working with your good customers to keep them happy and keep revenue and cash flowing instead of pursuing a debt that clearly is not going to get paid without the assistance of a collections agency.
You may wonder, how can commercial collection agencies be successful collecting an outstanding invoice when you have already made tons of calls, emails, and letters. The sad truth is that some companies owe so much money to so many people that they will only pay once they are contacted by a collections agency. In those situations, it doesn't matter how often you call, you will never get paid until a debt collection agency gets involved.
Another sad truth is that many debt collection agencies rely solely on that one truth (e.g. that someone will not pay until contacted by a collections agency) to make their money. Many commercial collection agencies make all their money off of these simple business debt collection efforts. They use predictive dialers to make thousands of calls an hour, and connect minimally trained minimum wage business debt collection agents to debtors once the call is answered. All they do is read a script on the computer screen and hope that results in a business debt collection. These debt collections agencies may also send out a few demand letters, each one more threatening than the other. But if no money is received after these minimal efforts, they give up on your debt and move to the next one.
Is that the type of debt collection agency you are looking for? Of the thousands of commercial collection agencies, that might be the right type of agency for you if you have lots of small claims. If that is your situation, then you are on the wrong web page, as The Kaplan group is not that kind of debt collections agency.
Most commercial collection agencies claim they are relentless in chasing your money. These debt collection agencies tell you about researching to find good phone numbers and addresses. The large collection agencies simply have their computers dump their existing contact information into databases provided by outside firms, and then whatever possible leads that are received back simply receive phone calls from predictive dialers and form letters. Is that the kind of collections agency you are looking for?
Of all the commercial collection agencies out there, we are sure that there are a handful of others like The Kaplan Group that do their research on a case by case basis. We subscribe to extensive data bases in order to get information to provide our debt collection services. But we go far beyond that. How many debt collection agencies can say these spend hundreds of hours searching the web for resources and training their staff on how to piece small bits of information together in order to locate debtors or determine if they are telling the truth? How many commercial collections agencies are lead by an Internet pioneer like Dean Kaplan, who has provided consulting services to a wide variety of Internet companies since 1998 and use this expertise to locate debtors and information about their financial status?
In the end, the only thing that really matters is "did your money get collected". It is great if a simple phone call and letter writing campaign gets your money. But in 97% of the debt collection claims we work on, it is not that simple. At our collections agency, we use a custom approach on each claim. That means we study all of the information provided by the client before we make our first call. We work to understand who each of the people are at the debtor company, their role in the original contract or service, and their role in getting a bill paid. We look at the various phone numbers, to understand if people have direct lines or everything goes through a main number. We decide who is the primary person we want to talk to. For small companies, this typically is the owner. For larger companies it may be the CFO, an accounts payable manager, or a purchasing agent.
Instead of using predictive dialers (which don't know how to handle business phone answering systems), our commercial collection agency collectors decide what is the best time to call and how often to call. They listen to the options given by the answering systems, they leave messages for a variety of people, they call other employees at the debtor to find out who is in the office and if the people not returning calls are traveling or simply ignoring calls. The messages we leave change depending on the specific situation, the number of calls we've made, the time since a last contact or payment, the person's role at the company, etc. There is no way someone reading a script can do this - it takes a highly trained and experienced business debt collection agent to make calls like this and figure out what is the best way to get the necessary person on the phone. Most commercial collection agencies do not operate this way.
It would be nice that when we get a debtor on the phone, all we have to do is insist on getting payment in full immediately and it would magically happen. It is rarely that simple. The key to being a successful collections agency on large claims is to know how to figure out what is really happening at the debtor and what to say in order to get the most money the fastest. The goal of all debt collection agencies is to get all the money in one call, but the reality, especially on large claims, is that it often takes strategy, commitment, cunning and sometimes patience to get as much money as possible as soon as possible.
The Kaplan Group is a boutique collections agency, with highly skilled and experienced business professionals who are experts at commercial collections. If you are owed a significant amount of money, you cannot find a better commercial collection agency.
