Credit Control Leverages LiveVox?s VoIP to Grow

Credit Control LLC in St. Louis was a small healthcare collection firm that Brian Hamilton purchased with a partner about 18 months ago and added bankcard collections to its array of offerings.

Hamilton, now the company chief operating officer, knew that the firm had to efficiently utilize its collectors to be successful. The last thing a collection executive wants to see is an agent failing to reach the proper parties. It’s increasingly difficult to make right party connections, Hamilton explains, what with the propensity of cell phones, and consumers away from their land line phones.

So he turned to LiveVox, a provider of hosted dialers.

“We see our [traditional] dialer struggling to keep agents busy,” Hamilton said. “When we run LiveVox, the floor hums, the agents are more productive and our customers’ needs are met.”

The difference is that the LiveVox dialer uses Voice over Internet Protocol, so it can scale to add virtual lines as necessary to reach right parties. Once a right party is reached, an agent joins the call.

Now that its 150 agents spend more time on right party connections, Credit Control can go after more and smaller accounts than it could using more traditional calling technologies, according to Hamilton.

“We’re using a better technology at a lower price,” Hamilton added. “Because we’re small, we would concentrate only on high-balance accounts worth more than $750. Now we can afford to take those [smaller] accounts and even compete with offshore companies.”

And those accounts are proving to be profitable, bringing in more than $60,000 last year.

For larger accounts, the company competes with the likes of NCO Group. Despite its size, Credit Control has won a number of its battles with the account receivables giant, and has grown from a $1.5 million to a $10 million company in the last 18 months, according to Hamilton.

LiveVox is only part of the company’s technology, Hamilton added. The company uses more traditional calling processes for some follow-ups and for lead generation.