Setting up contact management
Due to the setup needs of the Contact Management feature, it is not enabled at the time of The Collector System installation.
To prepare the Personal Contacts screen to store and manage account contact information, you need to define the following information for your agency:
- Contact types—The category of the contact. For example, Phone, Address, Email, and so on.
- Contact subtypes—The type of contact. Most contact types will have multiple subtypes. For example, the Phone contact type can have subtypes that include Land Line, Cell, Pager, Work, and so on.
- Statuses—Describes the validity of the contact type, such as Bad, Good, Invalid, and so on.
- Contact action codes—Describes the result of contacting the customer. For example, No Answer, Busy, Talked to Responsible Party.
- Contact authorization (if applicable)—If a responsible party gives permission for your agency to contact the account, you can prompt the user to provide information regarding who and how the permission was given.
- Fiscal fields (if applicable)—You can create a Fiscal field that stores personal contact information and displays it in the Personal Contacts screen.
The Collector System comes with a few default contact types, subtypes, statuses, contact action codes, and contact authorizations that most agencies can use, but we recommend that you review and configure each of these for your own agency. Keep in mind that you cannot remove or delete the default settings.
While you can set up different contact results for phone numbers, which a user selects when they are calling the account, address contact attempts work differently. When a user generates or prints a letter from The Collector System or sends it to a third-party letter vendor, The Collector System considers either scenario a successful attempt to reach the account, and records it as such in the Personal Contacts screen.
Starting with The Collector System 2015, the snapshot (SNAP) command used in the Collector screen displays a list of the letters/notices sent to the customer. The list is derived from the contact management feature. Before the SNAP screen will show the list of letter/notice names, you must first enable the contact management feature. For older accounts, this means that there may be a discrepancy between the number of letters sent and the list of letters/notices since The Collector System cannot track the name of the letters/notices sent before the contact management feature is enabled. Eventually, your agency will encounter this discrepancy less often as collectors work and close older accounts. The number and list of letters/notices will match for any new accounts added to the system after your agency enables the contact management feature. For more information, see Viewing collection snapshots.
When setting up contact management for the first time, we recommend that you perform the following steps, in order.
Some of the steps may not apply to your agency, depending on your business processes. For example, you may not require your collectors to receive contact authorization from a responsible party when
- Activating or deactivating contact management options.
- Adding a contact type.
- Adding a contact subtype for phone numbers, addresses, and emails.
- Adding a contact status for phone numbers, addresses, and emails.
- Adding a contact authorization method.
- Adding a contact authorization source.
- Adding or editing Fiscal fields.
- Set up account contact action codes.
- Creating or updating the Contacts Record files.
- Building the Contacts cross-reference file.
- Creating or changing contact attempt filters.