Your collections staff may be experiencing a flood of payment deductions or just a trickle. The best approach for managing these deductions will vary based on the incoming volume. For instance, if the collections staff is inundated with deductions, it makes more sense to assign deduction resolution work to people who specialize in a particular type of deduction, such as problems with shipment damage, pricing complaints, or product returns. This means that if a customer takes multiple types of deductions on one invoice, it may receive calls from a different clerk for each of the deductions. This may not seem efficient from the customer’s perspective, but works well for the company.
A different approach is used when there is a low volume of deductions. In this scenario, it makes more sense to leverage the collection staff’s personal knowledge of each customer to resolve items on a case-by-case basis. Further, there is not enough deduction volume to make it cost-effective to employ a clerk full-time on deductions in general or on a single type of deduction.
A hybrid approach is to assign a specialist deduction clerk to a single type of deduction for which the company is experiencing high volume, but not for other types of deductions with lower volume levels.