INDUSTRY: TRAVEL, ENTERTAINMENT
The Client
The client is a American travel agency providing services for entertainment, corporate and leisure travelers, with satellite offices throughout the United States. Well established in their industry, the client has specialized in entertainment in particular for decades, serving world famous artists in film, music and television.
The Case
The client needed to grow their collections capabilities as their in-house team could no longer handle the existing workload. They needed an outsourcing partner that could take on the excess collections and save on cost, while maintaining the current quality of work. Many vendors the business needed to collect from were large corporations in the hospitality industry, so agents needed to be extremely professional.
The Solution
The client wanted our agents to match the results achieved by their in-house team as they would be completely replacing them so the client could use them in other roles. Thus a rigorous hiring process was implemented on the client’s behalf. All candidates were made to pass multiple tests designed by Concert8’s Human Resources team, and then they would be personally interviewed by select members of our management team, and then a final time by the client themselves.
Training materials were provided by the client, but as our team gained more experience Concert8 also built additional knowledge guides to be used along with, and improve the efficacy of the
materials provided by the client. A key challenge of collecting commissions was getting through gatekeepers in financial departments within the respective properties to get in touch with the decision makers that are able to issue payment. The client provided the Concert8 team with their recommended script to follow to collect commissions, however the team was eventually allowed to make modifications as long as standard procedures were followed.
With our agents’ improvements made to the script and calling strategies, Concert8 managed not only to match but exceed the client’s in-house team’s performance. By delivering multiple follow ups via outbound calls, invoices, and emails on a daily basis, Concert8’s collections agents managed to achieve a high success rate and went as far as to collect the highest single commission from a property in the travel company’s history.