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So, I've finally managed to wrest the dunning calls back out of the hands of the woman who didn't do them regularly, and regularly did them wrong. It's amazing how much more willing people are to work with you when you give them a friendly status request versus accusing them of being late paying their bills and demanding to know what they plan to do about it. 
So, among the duties of the dunning caller is to contact people who have bounced check payments. Thankfully this happens rarely. We recoup the fees from the bank by charging a standard fee, which I'll say is $25 but isn't really.
One of our customers has a COD account and the check they paid for their order was returned by the bank for insufficient funds. This isn't good. The check was for less than $100 dollars, which I'll say is $90 but isn't really. This happened at the end of last month.
So, I call the company, speak to the buyer, who says she will pass my information on to the accounts payable person.
Two days later, I call back, speak to the buyer again, and again give a message to be passed on to the accounts payable person.
The weekend comes and goes and I call again, this time speaking to someone else who claims to be the accounts payable person, but who has no authority to do, well, anything at all about the returned check. She starts going on about how she can avoid the fee, to which I reply, "Well, unfortunately, to avoid that you would have had to have enough money in the bank to cover the check." She was rather put out over that. She takes another message to give to the person who does have the authority as soon as they become available.
Wednesday, I call back, speak to the new person again, and again, nobody with any authority is available. Now, I'm tired of dealing with this company, and Bossman had asked that he speak to them before I send them off to collections. We don't normally pass things off this quickly, but it was for less than $100 (slightly more with the fee), so it isn't worth the time to hassle with. We don't care if we lose a bunch to the agency. I put her on hold, track down Bossman, and give him a heads up on where the call is held and who and what it is.
Bossman takes the call in the shipping department, near where he had been working. Shipping guy (my boyfriend) relays to me later that day that among the things he heard was Bossman asking how long she worked there (two weeks - she had told me she was new, but made it sound like a lot newer than that), if she had been paid (not yet), and then offering hopes that not only will she be paid, but that the paycheck doesn't bounce like our COD payment. I suspect that had her a bit rattled. Bossman then came to me, said that she would be calling back with credit card information and to take it down and just charge for the value of the check; he would wait until that was paid and then go after them for the fee. I feel sorry for them; he can be quite politely unpleasant when pissed off at someone. It really is an art with him.
So, it gets later and there's no call. So I call them, asking if the so-far mythical authority figure is out of their meeting and able to provide credit card details. She requests a form be faxed that she can fill out and return. Easy enough: I have just such a form in my system that I can fax right over. Unfortunately, I manage to screw up filling out the form, and then forget to actually fax it over. I call back an hour later and she tells me that she didn't receive it. So I get an email address and email it, instead. Another hour passes, and still no email. I updated Bossman and Bosslady, and notice the unsent form, which I also send, as backup/reminder to powerless accounts payable woman that she still owes me that information. The day ends with no word back.
I am out on Thursday, and nothing happens. No word from her and no calls to her.
Friday, I spend my entire day working on a project fixing a minor but rather irritating mistake I had made with the inventory system. Bosslady is swamped putting out fires so lets this one go for this week.
I'm not sure what's going to happen on Monday. Either I or, more likely, Bossman is going to call them back and give them one last chance to do something. I'm not going to hold my breath that they will. The smart money is on me making a call to our collections agents to go after them for us and put a black mark on their rating. The company we use is international and huge; this will go on their history.
The funny part is that the company isn't that far away. In the time we've spent with their people on the phone, they could probably have scraped up the money owed and driven it to our office and taken less than all of the phone calls put together.
My suspicion is that they're stalling until a payment from one of their customers comes in. But rather than let us know that's what they're doing, they're stonewalling us and hoping we'll forget long enough to get to that point. Which is absolutely the fastest way to get us to send you to collections.
We actually let one customer have an unpaid invoice for two years. Then again, that was a long-time customer who made a point to actually initiate calls from his end and keep us updated about his progress on figuring out where the problem was. He never did figure it out (even with the nice charts I made for him), but he did pay the past due balance.
^-.-^
So, among the duties of the dunning caller is to contact people who have bounced check payments. Thankfully this happens rarely. We recoup the fees from the bank by charging a standard fee, which I'll say is $25 but isn't really.
One of our customers has a COD account and the check they paid for their order was returned by the bank for insufficient funds. This isn't good. The check was for less than $100 dollars, which I'll say is $90 but isn't really. This happened at the end of last month.
So, I call the company, speak to the buyer, who says she will pass my information on to the accounts payable person.
Two days later, I call back, speak to the buyer again, and again give a message to be passed on to the accounts payable person.
The weekend comes and goes and I call again, this time speaking to someone else who claims to be the accounts payable person, but who has no authority to do, well, anything at all about the returned check. She starts going on about how she can avoid the fee, to which I reply, "Well, unfortunately, to avoid that you would have had to have enough money in the bank to cover the check." She was rather put out over that. She takes another message to give to the person who does have the authority as soon as they become available.
Wednesday, I call back, speak to the new person again, and again, nobody with any authority is available. Now, I'm tired of dealing with this company, and Bossman had asked that he speak to them before I send them off to collections. We don't normally pass things off this quickly, but it was for less than $100 (slightly more with the fee), so it isn't worth the time to hassle with. We don't care if we lose a bunch to the agency. I put her on hold, track down Bossman, and give him a heads up on where the call is held and who and what it is.
Bossman takes the call in the shipping department, near where he had been working. Shipping guy (my boyfriend) relays to me later that day that among the things he heard was Bossman asking how long she worked there (two weeks - she had told me she was new, but made it sound like a lot newer than that), if she had been paid (not yet), and then offering hopes that not only will she be paid, but that the paycheck doesn't bounce like our COD payment. I suspect that had her a bit rattled. Bossman then came to me, said that she would be calling back with credit card information and to take it down and just charge for the value of the check; he would wait until that was paid and then go after them for the fee. I feel sorry for them; he can be quite politely unpleasant when pissed off at someone. It really is an art with him.
So, it gets later and there's no call. So I call them, asking if the so-far mythical authority figure is out of their meeting and able to provide credit card details. She requests a form be faxed that she can fill out and return. Easy enough: I have just such a form in my system that I can fax right over. Unfortunately, I manage to screw up filling out the form, and then forget to actually fax it over. I call back an hour later and she tells me that she didn't receive it. So I get an email address and email it, instead. Another hour passes, and still no email. I updated Bossman and Bosslady, and notice the unsent form, which I also send, as backup/reminder to powerless accounts payable woman that she still owes me that information. The day ends with no word back.
I am out on Thursday, and nothing happens. No word from her and no calls to her.
Friday, I spend my entire day working on a project fixing a minor but rather irritating mistake I had made with the inventory system. Bosslady is swamped putting out fires so lets this one go for this week.
I'm not sure what's going to happen on Monday. Either I or, more likely, Bossman is going to call them back and give them one last chance to do something. I'm not going to hold my breath that they will. The smart money is on me making a call to our collections agents to go after them for us and put a black mark on their rating. The company we use is international and huge; this will go on their history.
The funny part is that the company isn't that far away. In the time we've spent with their people on the phone, they could probably have scraped up the money owed and driven it to our office and taken less than all of the phone calls put together.
My suspicion is that they're stalling until a payment from one of their customers comes in. But rather than let us know that's what they're doing, they're stonewalling us and hoping we'll forget long enough to get to that point. Which is absolutely the fastest way to get us to send you to collections.
We actually let one customer have an unpaid invoice for two years. Then again, that was a long-time customer who made a point to actually initiate calls from his end and keep us updated about his progress on figuring out where the problem was. He never did figure it out (even with the nice charts I made for him), but he did pay the past due balance.
^-.-^
Idiots. Once it's sent to collections, it stays with collections, with all of the new fees piled right on. They had their chance to work with us; we'll be happy (well, maybe not happy, exactly) to set up a payment plan. We can accept partials. 
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