Lia's first 30 days in collections
How an Iberian utility design partner recovered €184K in 60 days without a new hire.
The problem
Our design partner is a mid-size Iberian utility with a long tail of overdue invoices in the 30–90 day bucket. Big enough to hurt cash flow, small enough that the in-house team had stopped chasing them.
The agency they'd been using charged 18% commission and recovered about a third of what they touched. The math worked, but only barely.
Lia's first month
Lia called 2,140 accounts in thirty days. She negotiated payment plans on 612, took card payments live on 188, and escalated 94 to a human for hardship review. €184K recovered in the first 60 days, against a portfolio of €620K.
The recovery rate beat the agency by 9 points and the unit cost was a quarter of what they'd been paying. The CFO has already asked us about expanding her to the 90+ bucket.
Tone matters more than scripts
The single biggest unlock wasn't the script, it was the voice. People in arrears are anxious. Lia is calm, patient, and never escalates. Customers told us in post-call surveys that it was the first time a collections call hadn't ruined their afternoon.
That's the part of the job that's hardest to hire for at scale, and the part Lia does the same way on call 2,140 as on call one.