3 Ways Collection Queues Benefit Lenders

Unfortunately, not every borrower at your institution will keep up with their payments. Some of them may even fall behind enough to land themselves in delinquency status. When that happens, collectors need to step in and protect your investment, and the best tool to assist them is a collection queue.

Further reading: Measuring Loan Delinquency

Collection Queues

Collection queues are lists of loan accounts determined to be delinquent by your institution’s specific criteria. These lists are generated in the afterhours and assigned to collection employees through our loan servicing software (CIM GOLD). Once your institution gets its collection queues set up, your employees will find numerous features provided to streamline the collection process, including:

• At-a-glance data tables displaying names, account numbers, balances, amounts due, contact attempts, and recent comments attached to the account.
• The ability to create Mail Merge letters using Microsoft Word’s Mail Merge function, which automatically fills template documents with account information as pulled from CIM.
• Quick access to other CIM screens to update the account’s information without navigating away from the queue. The screens available for quick access can be set according to your institution’s preferences (different screens for different queue types, for example).

Set Up

The process of setting up collection queues can be a little complicated. Fortunately, GOLDPoint Systems account representatives and DocsOnWeb are always available to guide you. Your institution’s administrators can use the Queue Administration screen in CIM to set up the particulars of your collection queues, including:

• Queue names and descriptions.
• Whether released/zero balance/locked loans are included in queues.
• Whether queues are branch segmented.
• Account selection logic parameters.
• Which employees are designated to receive queues, as well as which queues each employee receives.
• Whether employees must move down a queue sequentially or are allowed to “cherry pick” accounts from their list.

Streamline Collections

Once all the hard behind-the-scenes work has been done, your collections employees will be able to efficiently work through their queues with a minimum of supervisor intervention. With the proper setup, the collection process can be as simple as the following example:

1. The employee accesses the Collection Queues screen and signs in with their employee ID.
2. The employee selects a queue, which fills the table with that queue’s up-to-date information.
3. The employee selects an account in the table and calls the customer.
4. If the borrower answers, the employee updates the borrower’s CIM information in that same window based on the outcome of the call.
5. If the borrower doesn’t answer, the employee tells the system to generate a Mail Merge letter to mail to the customer.
6. The employee clicks Next to proceed to the next account in the queue and repeats the process.

Conclusion

If your institution isn’t currently using collection queues to organize and streamline the collection process (or if you think you could utilize collection queues more effectively), contact your GOLDPoint account manager to learn more. Also, remember that GOLDPoint prides itself on the customizability of its products. If there is additional functionality your institution would like to be added to our Queues system, we would love to discuss it with you.

For more information, see these other topics:

• Effectively Manage Collecting Past Due Accounts
• Common Collection Queue Setups
• Creating Mail Merge Letters