Collecting vast amounts of information is just the beginning for organizations aiming to stay ahead of the competition. The real challenge lies in transforming this data into actionable business intelligence that can drive strategic decisions and improve outcomes.
For debt buyers, collection agencies, and law firms, the ability to extract meaningful insights from data is what sets industry leaders apart. By effectively managing data and turning it into strategic business initiatives, these organizations can and will gain a significant competitive advantage.
Gathering Data and Managing Data Storage
The first step in leveraging data for business intelligence is ensuring that data is collected efficiently and structured in a way that makes it accessible and useful. Essentially, this involves implementing robust data storage solutions that can handle large volumes of information while ensuring data integrity and security. Many collection agencies rely on third party tools and systems that have pre-built data storage solutions. These solutions are effective, but the key here is ensuring whatever solution you use allows you to pick and choose the correct KPI data you find valuable when evaluating portfolio potential and performance.
Building dashboards and understanding key performance indicators (KPIs) is a natural progression in the data storage process. Allowing companies to keep a close eye on their operations and performance metrics, data storage is an often overlooked aspect of building a data intelligence system.
However, simply monitoring KPIs isn’t enough. Organizations need to dig deeper into their data to uncover hidden patterns and trends that can inform decision-making. Effectively managing data storage also means being able to organize and retrieve data quickly, ensuring that the right people have access to the right information at the right time.
As most conversations in the mid 2020s, this turns us to the advent and potential of AI. As this technology progresses, it will be increasingly important for your data storage solution to also give you the ability to implement robust AI tools to skim and assess your portfolio data. AI has the potential to not only allow you to search mountains of data in seconds but also organize and monitor data for key KPIs necessary when evaluating new portfolios or potential opportunities within established portfolios. Artificial intelligence also provides opportunities to systematically create structured data from what was previously unstructured. A use case example is collector notes. With different abbreviations used in notes by different collectors, it becomes impossible to effectively search and understand. By using AI to take call notes, the notes are structured in the same way across all collectors and all calls providing a new mountain of data that can be tapped to identify trends and insights.
Turning Data into Business Intelligence
This leads us to the real crux of the data storage and use case scenario—actually using the data. This involves analyzing the data to identify opportunities for improvement, areas of risk, and potential strategies for growth.
For example, when evaluating a portfolio for purchase, a debt buyer might have access to a wealth of information about individual accounts. However, the true value of the portfolio is driven by a few key factors: the age of the accounts, the type of products involved, and the state of the individual accounts. These key KPIs change based on organization, but the fact remains that having the data is worthless without the tools and management capabilities necessary to access that data.
By focusing on these critical data points and techniques, the debt buyer can make an informed decision about whether to proceed with the purchase, how to price the portfolio, and what strategies to employ for collection. This ability to pinpoint the most valuable aspects of a data set and take action based on those insights is what distinguishes successful organizations from their competitors.
About Plaza Services LLC
Plaza Services, LLC is an accounts receivable portfolio investment firm founded in 2013 and headquartered in Atlanta, GA. Plaza Services manages and services acquired accounts while maintaining the highest ethical and legal standards. Plaza is committed to providing a positive experience for consumers while providing creditors with maximum value for receivables portfolios in a fully compliant manner. As an RMAI Certified Debt Buyer, Plaza Services delivers quick portfolio evaluations and seamless transaction execution with clear accountability after the sale, making us the perfect partner for creditors. Plaza Services partners with a very select group of vetted partners in the auto loan, fintech, consumer loan, and consumer credit spaces, among other types of creditors, in order to improve cash flow to the bottom line and mitigate financial losses caused by overdue assets through the acquisition and recovery of distressed and dormant receivables portfolios.
