By: Maria Moynihan
Reduced budgets, quickly evolving technologies, a weakened economy and resource constraints are clearly impacting the Public Sector, but it’s not all doom and gloom. Always with new challenges, come new opportunities.
Government agencies must still effectively run programs, optimize processes and find growth in revenue streams. Below you will find the top 5 business challenges facing the Public Sector and municipal utilities today and ways to overcome them:
1. Difficulty finding debtors
When asked to name the top challenge to their debt collection processes, governments most often indicate the difficulty in locating debtors whose whereabouts don’t in fact match information they have on hand.
Skip tracing with right party contact data is key to finding people or businesses for collections and there are several cost effective ways to do this – either through industry leading tools or by tapping into available sources like voter registration information.
2. Difficulty in prioritizing debt collection efforts
When resources are limited, it is critical to not only focus efforts by size, but by likelihood to make contact and access debtors with an ability to pay. Credit and demographic data elements like income, assets, past payment behavior, and age can all be brought together to better identify areas of greater ROI over others.
3. Lack of data available
By simply incorporating third-party data and analytics into an established infrastructure, agencies can immediately gain improved insight for efficient decision making. Leverage on-hand data sources to improve understandings of individuals or businesses.
4. Difficulty of incorporating tools to improve debt recovery
Governments too often attempt to reduce backlogs by simply trying to accelerate processes that are suboptimal to start with. This is both expensive and unlikely to produce the desired result. In the case of debt collection, success is driven by the tools and processes that allow for refined monitoring, segmentation and prioritization of accounts for improved decisioning.
5. Difficulty in determining to outsource or continue to internally collect
While outsourcing to debt collection agencies is always an option, it may not be the most resourceful one, or in some cases, even necessary. Cost to value considerations per effort need to be made by agencies and often, the most effective strategy is to perform minimal efforts internally and to outsource older or skip accounts to third party agencies.
What is your agency’s biggest business challenge? See what industry experts suggest as best practices for Public Sector collections or download Experian’s guide to Maximizing Revenue Potential in the Public Sector to learn more.
