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Humor in Debt Collections
Remember the old adage that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Your credibility is one thing at risk if you choose to use humor in collection correspondence. Humor can into question both your judgment and how serious you are about collecting the past due balance.
Humorous collection messages may undermine your efforts to collect past due balances quickly and effectively. Proponents of the use of humorous labels, stickers, and stamps for use with monthly account statements and other dunning type notices believe that a humorous request for payment is more likely to be noticed and acted upon. The use of humor in debt collection may be appropriate occasionally. However, chronic delinquent payers tend to ignore dunning notices, and poor paying customers are far more likely to ignore humorous dunning or collection notices.
Collecting a past due balance is a serious matter. The use of humor a humorous dunning notice is unlikely to convince a chronically slow paying customer to pay more quickly. Humor can...
- Send a message that the matter is trivial, and
- Can signal that the creditor is not serious about being paid,
- Could delay payment even further,
- Might convince the debtor that there are unlikely to be serious consequences associated with a serious payment delinquency.
Edited by Michael C. Dennis & Michael Zininberg. Mr. Dennis is the author of several books relating to credit management. He is also business consultant and can be reached by email at mcdennis13@yahoo.com