“We have many different clients in Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming,” said Jim Eastwood, Dialer Manager for Bonneville.

Bonneville divides its accounts into three stages, using different features of CT Center for the first two stages. In stage one, collectors work accounts with CT Center’s predictive dialer. Stage two is worked by more advanced collectors, who occasionally use the power dialer to work accounts. Lastly, stage three, accounts are turned over to Bonneville’s attorneys for legal action.

“Our agents are on PD (Predictive Dialing) all day long, everyday,” said Eastwood, “But you can’t rule out IC. Some accounts come to a point when you wonder what else can be done to collect payment, so we put them on IC.”

IC, or Interactive Communications, is a two-fold feature of CT Center. IC Outbound delivers an interactive message to accounts. Messages can be personalized for payment reminders, demand for payment or settlement campaigns, which Bonneville uses on an outbound effort for their problem accounts.

Bonneville utilizes IC Outbound not only for its collection accounts but for its sister company, Bonneville Management Services (BMS). During these campaigns, IC Outbound will leave messages for BMS customers with a call back number to its Boise, Idaho office.

IC Inbound, or better known as IVR, is used at Bonneville to answer calls and process payments from callers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Recently, an option for accounts to leave a personal message for the agency was added to better serve them.

“IAT is constantly working to produce scalable products to fit the needs of any company doing collections,” said Randy Cooper, President and CEO of IAT, “CT Center offers a host of options, from four dialing modes to custom recorded messages, our products increase productivity and collection rates to provide not just a system, but a tailored solution.”

For more information about IAT’s SmartDial® solutions visit iatsmartdial.com, call (800) 574-8801 or e-mail info@iatsmartdial.com.

So, if you are current on Support and are sending one person to the conference, you can qualify to send a second person for half the price.

That’s 50% off to the winner of our drawing to be held on April 30.

While governments across the nation have varying budget constraints, many are taking the time to invest in technology. Read the full article from the February/March issue of CourtsToday.com here.

The technology we provide at IAT is an investment but can replace valuable and expensive employee resources, increase the amount of delinquent accounts collected and improve the productivity of your employees. For more information about our government solutions, click here.

Become a fan of IAT on Facebook, follow our tweets on Twitter, join our customer group on Collectiontechnology.net, and check out our company profile on LinkedIn and join the Information Access Technology group!

When: May 12-14

Where: Salt Lake City Downtown Radisson, Salt Lake City, Utah

Room rate: $89 single or double rate per night

Registration Fee: FREE to one person from each company, currently on an Advantage Support Plan and an unlimited number attendees from Platinum Support customers. All others are $295 each.

Conference topics:

• Unified Communications: Using PD, IC, IB together
• List Management
• Dialogues
• Answering Machines
• Configuring Results
• Exports
• Plus 2 Breakout Round Table Sessions covering discussed topics

To register, contact Kendra Fugal at (800) 574-8801 or John Roundy at (800) 646-5227. Online registration coming soon!

We enjoyed a purple bowling ball cupcake-cake to celebrate.

IAT celebrated 24 years of success in the dialing technology industry on March 6, 2010.

IAT’s original product, SmartDial^®, was the first predictive dialer created specifically for the

collections industry. More than two decades after its founding, IAT’s SmartDial Solutions provide customers with the most comprehensive and adaptable selection of dialing solutions.

The entire company bowled over 24 years of dialing technology success at a local bowling alley to celebrate.

“We offer hosted, site-premised and hybrid solutions, so we can provide each customer with a solution adapted for their situation,” Randy Cooper, IAT President and CEO, said.

“Since our beginning in1986, we’ve concentrated on providing products tailored to our clients’ requirements and requests.”

IAT strives to maintain long-standing relationships and many of their

customers have been using IAT products for more than ten years. Several have been customers since the company’s inception. Each SmartDial Solution is backed by a customer support team working diligently to ensure customers understand how to use the system.

Peter Allen, Manager of ACS, recognized the rural location of the office in Lewiston, Maine can make commuting difficult for the growing agency of 11 employees. Using CT Impact’s Hosted Broadcast Messaging, Allen has created a virtual office where employees work from home during every shift of the work day.

“In the past, we had some difficulty staffing the evening calling campaigns; people tend to not want to work that shift. However, it’s much easier to do that with agents working from home,” said Allen.

Primarily, Allen runs CT Impact Hosted Broadcast Messaging during the evening, when most of his agents are working from home. CT Impact will transfer incoming calls to available agents working in the office or from home.

Adding IAT’s CT Impact Hosted Services to ACS was easy for Allen, who has had IAT’s site-premised predictive dialer, CT Center, for over 20 years. Allen has found it easier to retain agents and expand business while only slightly increasing staffing levels with both CT Center and CT Impact working for him.

Ray Fowler, IAT’s Director of Sales and Marketing, sees the potential collection agencies can obtain with CT Impact. “We’ve found that using the hosted services of CT Impact provides incredible flexibility for collection agencies. It allows agencies like ACS to be flexible with its employees’ work environments but still contact numerous accounts during the working hours of the day,” Fowler said.

“We looked at other competitors,” said Natasha Gomez, Corporate Manager of Mountain Glacier, “But everything went really smoothly when we inquired about IAT.”

Mountain Glacier has three collection agents who contact their 25,000 commercial and residential accounts within the zero to 90 day past due period. During this time, they use CT Impact hosted predictive dialing with the option to leave a message.

“The reports are easy to upload and our supervisor really likes CT Impact,” said Gomez, “She’s on it all day, everyday.”

After the 90 day mark, the accounts are turned over to their attorney for further collection efforts.

IAT, the creator of SmartDial®, has been developing dialing technology for two decades. CT Impact is constantly being improved to create greater ease of use and independence for the customer. “We’re making improvements all the time,” said Randy Cooper, IAT CEO, “One of our most recent additions is a real time data interface with our vendor partner Beam 4D.”

The real time interface eliminates the need to upload accounts to the CT Impact Web site by giving CT Impact current accounts to contact, in real time. IAT also provides software development kits, which provides a general data interface for customers not using Beam 4D to develop their own real time interface.

“Our kits allow more automation for our customers, they don’t have to rely so heavily on IAT if they have the automation on their end,” said Cooper, “Which means we can provide more support for our CT Impact customers.”

The constant improvements to CT Impact make it easier for agencies like Mountain Glacier to achieve success. “We’ve seen a change in the numbers of our accounts receivables bucket,” said Gomez, “The numbers of our zero to 90 day accounts have changed for the better.”

CT Impact Hosted Broadcast Messaging allows Aidex the flexibility to control its message campaigns in a compliant manner. Dan Herrejon, Aidex Director of Operations, said they alter dates and times the message is left to fit within compliant hours and to measure which time periods reach more contacts. Aidex also changes which agents handle the inbound calls from their campaigns.

“Agencies have to be very careful because there are a lot of consumers initiating lawsuits on collection agencies,” said Herrejon, “We just received our ACA membership and rely on their guidance for compliant message wording.”

Jacksonville, Florida based Aidex handles health accounts, so it has to comply with federal laws governing collection agencies and patient privacy laws such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

“The people at IAT are very helpful for what to say in messages. IAT has been a great reference to share what other agencies are saying and how we can use CT Impact to be more effective,” said Herrejon.

IAT’s products offer built-in compliance defaults to its customers. “We recommend consulting ACA for compliant message wording,” said Randy Cooper, CEO of IAT, “We believe vendors have a responsibility to provide products that, by default, comply with general federal and state laws. However, our customers can tailor our technology to their definition of compliance.”

“There’s constant tweaking,” said Herrejon, “We don’t want to open ourselves up to a lawsuit but we still want to be effective.”

• IAT’s CT Center can detect answering machines by office, client, list or phone number type (POE, home, etc.). A default message will be left, unless you contact IAT Support to alter the default settings to your system.
• The IAT default message for predictive dialer and interactive communication agents is:

Hello, I’m calling about important personal business.

Please call me back as soon as possible at the following number (office phone number).

Again, my number is (office phone number).

Thank you, goodbye.

• A variety of messages can be used for predictive dialing and interactive communications agents. If IAT doesn’t offer a message that fits your business, a custom message can be created for your specific business needs and objectives.
• If you are concerned about obeying federal and state laws, IAT cannot provide legal counsel, but please visit ACA International’s site for legal information here.
• A new feature of CT Center 7.0 is the Leave Msg. option. This allows agents who are on PD and receive an unexpected answering machine, to press a button on the IAT dialer toolbar and leave a pre-recorded message. Hence, increasing productivity because agents can then spend valuable talk time on a live call instead of leaving a manual message.

Advanced answering machines will be covered at IAT’s National Training Conference in May. To learn more about the National Training Conference and how to register, click here.