Social Sites for Skip Tracing Purposes Are Last Resort, Say ARS Panelists

*Support from Regal Technologies*

Sometimes the latest and greatest isn’t always the greatest.

With the buzz around social media and how it might ease skip tracing efforts for third-party agencies and creditors ignited for months, a number of ARM players have waded into using using them for skip tracing purposes. But what sort of results are they seeing? Apparently, not much.

In a pre-conference call with the Accounts Recovery Summit’s skip tracing panelists, one theme was clear: using social media strategies as treasure maps for finding debtors were the “last resort” of all three industry players’ recovery strategies.

Why? Here are a few reasons the panelists cited:

Information on social profiles is unreliable;

A lot of information is locked down and/or dated; and

Skip tracers and collectors tasked with skip tracing get addicted to the sites and become lost in the data.

That said, panelists shared their enthusiasm for using the sites to improve customer service. For originating creditors, this is crucial as two reasons why consumers aren’t paying are: they can’t, or they are mad at the lender. Social sites allow them to remedy any wrongs done and investigate why people aren’t paying. [AR.net blogged about that here.]

Tags: accounts.recovery.summit, skiptracing, social.media, waterfall

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Comment by Bob West on January 21, 2011 at 2:25pm: Mary,

Can you ask everyone what steps they use to skip trace AND how they confirm the debtors address?

Thank you

If you have any info on my question, would you please email me with that info.?

Thanks Again

Bob

Comment by Accounts Recovery on January 21, 2011 at 2:28pm: Sure, Bob. I'll ask the panelists - the session will happen next week.

Comment by john pratt on January 21, 2011 at 2:59pm: I agree that the social sites should be a last resort or even no resort at all. If one is pursuing judgments it may be useful. In an office that requires drilling down it may be useful but for most companies it is a waste of time which is a waste of money.

Comment by Michael Mann on January 21, 2011 at 3:17pm: Personally, I think social sites are the next big avenue for skip trace professionals. From experience, I recover more assets via social networking sites than I do via telephone and/or traditional skip trace databases.

It seems that in this day and age of throw away telephones and throw away addresses that the only constant is social networking sites. People may move, change phone numbers and or physically hide the collateral we are seeking but they will invariably communicate their most intimate details via social networking sites.

Care must be exercised in contact via these sites. 3rd party disclosure is a real problem that needs to be monitored carefully.

That being said, I can vouch for the effectiveness of skipping on these sites because they provide fully half or better of my contact with some of these debtors.

Comment by Stephen G. Florczak on January 24, 2011 at 12:37pm: Social sites are used by many agencies now. In fact, some issuers are asking agencies to use the sites to aid in the location process.

Comment by john pratt on January 26, 2011 at 12:45pm: I can see social sites being used by low volume agencies or to develop information to collect judgments or repos. For an agency with thousands upon thousands of accounts of which 70% of those will be skips the social sites are not cost effective. Perhaps if there is a segmentation of unique last names it would work but to do thousands of skips in a month. I don't think it would work. I see anecdotal evidence often but that does not translate to long term success. As far as issuers are concerned they ask for a lot of things that may not help the bottom line. I can develop a strategy for social sites and I use them myself but I feel there has to be control factors in place. Time is money.

Comment by Michael Mann on January 26, 2011 at 10:07pm: Very true. The effort has to be worth the use of the source.

I can see it being effective with high volume business only in the 'tiered' structure of collections where a skip desk is utilized in charge-off or back-end collections. If the amount justifies then a percentage of the large volume goes to a skip desk that spends time locating the debtor or assets.

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