How to trace debtors and gone away accounts
Tracing gone away accounts and debtor trace options - Are you doing enough to trace your gone away accounts?
As your database gets older it will become increasing out of date, this can cause all sorts of problems. All companies use databases to store information about their customers but how many actually keep them up to date. Even banks and building societies are finding they are having problems finding the owners of dormant accounts; we call these accounts “gone away” accounts. Some of these people could be debtors and owe the company money, others could actually be owed money, whatever the case we can help you locate debtors and gone away accounts. If you would like help locating a debtor please feel free to order our debtor trace service.
Should you need to be put back in touch with a customer you can order our People Search service.
Most companies don’t realise that there is a problem until it is too late, what do you do when that important letter comes back with the words “gone away” written across it. Actually there is much that can be done and although it’s easy to see why some companies see a returned envelope and simply do not have any follow up action, in truth they need to clamp down on these particular accounts. At FinderMonkey.co.uk we have even seen literally thousands of pounds worth of revenue been wiped off a high street banks figures as the money simply rolls out of the branch and straight to the head office collections department where the head office collect the money and the branch and its staff lose valuable revenue off their sales and bonus targets.
Any company or even company department no matter how small can improve in this area quickly and more important cost effectively. There are a few simple things that you can do to maximise your chances of letters not coming back “gone away”.
Firstly, you need to carry out six monthly checks on the accounts that you have, when was the last time you spoke or had contact with each customer? We would recommend doing this much more frequently should they be debtors. You don’t want to be pestering customers but it is a good idea when you do have contact with them to just double check all information, you will often find that when you call a call centre at some point in the call they ask you to confirm your information or double check it with the telephone operator, this is not for your benefit but for the companies in case it needs to contact you. If you need have customers who owe you money and you cannot contact them, it is a good idea to order a debtor trace, this can be done discreetly so should they still be at the last known address then we will not alert them to the fact that a debtor trace has being instructed. Debtor tracing is the most effective way of regaining contact with customers who owe you money.
Secondly, if a letter does come back “gone away” you need to act quickly and get to the bottom of the matter before months without customer contact go by. We would always recommend putting notes on a customer account to let all staff know that the account is down as gone away, this means that should the customer make contact all staff will know that the priority for that call is to obtain a new address. When the letter comes back you should immediately get the customer file and see what contact numbers you have for the customer and call them. In most cases the customer will have genuinely moved and just not mentioned it, it is worth giving the customer the benefit of the doubt as we all can appreciate that when moving house you have lots on your plate without thinking about contacting your bank or other companies. So give the customer a ring, no need to mention the returned letter, just ask to confirm their details and get that new address from them. There is no need to mention that the letter was returned gone away but there is certainly an opportunity to mention the contents of the letter, if they haven’t paid you need to get to the bottom of the matter asap and once they are on the phone it is a perfect opportunity to make sure you get the new address first, this will save having to instruct us to trace the debtor.
We must also look at the prospect of customers who write “gone away” on their own letters, there are lots of reasons why they do this; the main ones are to buy time or throw you off the scent. If you do phone them and they confirm the last known address it might be worth asking why a letter came back with “gone away” on it and it’s always worth noting that this has happened.
You could use these to clean the database and locate new addresses or to trace the gone away accounts for you. Always remember to give as much information as you can if you instruct our debtor trace service.
Good luck in keeping you database up to date. Tracing gone away accounts is not easy but if you use the information here it should be just a little bit easier. If you need further information you can contact us on 0113 2720736.