Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a collections specialist and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
A Collections Specialist is liable for contacting clients as well as collecting outstanding payments while exhibiting professionalism and trustworthiness.
The essential responsibilities of this position include monitoring accounts to identify outstanding debts, reviewing open accounts for collection efforts, investigating historical data for each debt or bill, making outbound collection calls in a professional manner while keeping customer relations, processing payments and refunds, updating account status records and collection efforts, finding and contacting clients to ask about their overdue payments, taking actions to encourage timely dept. payments, resolving client billing problems and rescuing accounts receivable, collecting customer payments in accordance with the payment due dates, providing appropriate follow-up payment arrangements, reviewing and monitoring assigned accounts and all applicable collection reports.
Core Skills Required to be a Collections Specialist
Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.
Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.
A collections specialist should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Critical Thinking:
Critical Thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally while understanding the logical connection between ideas in a reflective and independent thinking.
A Collections Specialist will always seek to determine whether the ideas, arguments and findings do represent the entire picture while identifying, analyzing and solving problems by deducing consequences from what he knows and making use of the information gathered.
Administrative Skills:
Administrative Skills are all the services related to the running of a business or keeping an office organized while supporting the efforts of the management team.
A Collections Specialist must develop these skills and emphasize the administrative skills to ensure high-level responsibilities that range from planning large scale events to creating presentations and analyzing financial data are handled carefully and efficiently.
Interpersonal Skills:
Interpersonal Skills are a set of abilities that enable a person to positively interact and work with others effectively while avoiding office disputes and personal issues with each other.
A Collections Specialist must learn the importance of these skills in the workplace and emphasis on every employee possessing them to build a more cohabit able and productive workplace with the help of each.
Team Building:
Team Building represents various types of activities used to enhance social relations and define roles within the different teams at the workplace.
A Collections Specialist ought to provide team building activities to his team to cultivate better communication, morale, motivation, productivity and help employees know each other better as well as their strengths and weaknesses to be used in building a better workplace.
Creativity:
Creativity is the skill of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality through the ability to perceive the world in new ways, find hidden patterns, make connections between unrelated phenomena and generate solutions.
A Collections Specialist should be able to think, then reproduce ideas and act on them to bring awareness of what was currently hidden and point to a new life that will progress the business to new heights.
Orientation to Work:
Orientation to Work is the introduction that is given to a new worker whereby he is introduced to coworkers and given relevant information like schedules, performance standards, benefits and facilities, names of the supervisors, etc.
A Collections Specialist must ensure that all new employees go through an orientation process to assimilate into the workplace and become familiar with what is expected of them.
Enjoyment of the Job:
Enjoyment of the Job is the ability to enjoy what you do rather than enjoying what you earn from it.
A Collections Specialist needs to creatively learn of ways to motivate his employees to benefit from the workplace by matching their personality to the culture of the organization where they fit best and allowing them to explore their hidden talents to grow and mature with the team.
Results Orientation:
Results Orientation is knowing and focusing on outstanding results and working hard to achieve them because they are significant.
A Collections Specialist must understand and make it clear to the employees how important results are and the competitive and results driven market that the company is facing while encouraging them to remain focused on the results that every project bears without fail.
Business Trend Awareness:
Business Trend Awareness is the capacity to be conscious of the changing ways in which the companies are developing in the marketplace.
A Collections Specialist should have the required knowledge of new business trends that he can instigate or follow and the understanding of how they are impacting the business decisions which will eventually bring success to the employees as well as the enterprise
Diversity Awareness:
Diversity Awareness is the understanding that people are different and unique in their particular way and respecting their uniqueness.
A Collections Specialist ought to successfully identify the various types of diversity presented in his company to be able to benefit from these individual differences in the hope of improving the success of his team and encourage the team members to become aware of these qualities and use them appropriately.
Hard Skills Required to be a Collections Specialist
Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.
Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.
A collections specialist should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.