The effectiveness of the collections department depends on the ability of its staff to collect the highest possible percentage of funds from overdue customers. However, consider the tasks they are assigned - reviewing the aging report for target customers, looking up contact information, pulling account files, contacting customers, tracking promise dates, sending out letters, and so on. Of these tasks, only one results in collections - the actual customer contact. All of the other activities reduce the effectiveness of the collections staff, because they are administrative in nature.
If those employees who are best at collections must handle all associated activities, then they will have far less time to make collection calls, so that the department manager must either hire and train additional employees to be collectors, or accept a low level of favorable collection results.
The solution is to hire administrative staff to assist the collectors with all activities not directly associated with customer contacts. This means that someone else should determine which accounts should be contacted, look up contact information, pull account files, track promise dates, and send out follow-up letters - in short, every collections activity previously noted, except for the actual customer contact. Further, do not require collections personnel to attend unnecessary meetings, or do anything that detracts from their core mission of collecting money from customers. If this seems like an expensive alternative, then consider how much more money the collections staff could obtain from customers if they had a laser focus on customer contacts, and nothing else.
The department manager must come to a key realization when taking this approach, which is that a top-quality collections person is a prized asset, whose time must be carefully directed toward realizing the highest possible collection rate. Collectors are, in effect, the bottleneck in the collections department, so their time must be carefully managed.