I was once sitting in a conference room where a group of us were doing a request for proposal for our skip tracing services, as most of us do. I was looking for good pricing and good data. The easy part was the pricing, but the amazing part to me was that all the companies I had in my office claimed to have the best data. As we all know not everyone can have the best data. But how do you really know who is giving you the best data at the best price?
Before you look at pricing, it is extremely important to be able to validate the quality of the data. If your collection system gives you the ability to evaluate the data, that can make your evaluation of skip tracing information easy. However, since most legacy systems are better at doing collections than they are at analytics, the validation of the quality of data is a bit more complex but can be well worth the effort.
Being able to export pertinent data from your collection system and import into a data warehouse to evaluate the quality of the data that is returned to you will not only make your skip tracing much more efficient, but can also save you a lot of money. It will prevent time being wasted working on information that has no value and will not help you collect the debt.
Building a good data warehouse can require an expertise that you may not have in house so one option could be to outsource your data warehouse work. The cost of developing a solid data warehouse may not be justifiable if you are only using it for skip tracing analysis. If you are starting from scratch then you should be building a data warehouse that will help improve your productivity agency-wide.
You might be reading this article and saying to yourself that you don’t have the time, money, or the expertise to build a data warehouse. You understand the importance of knowing what you are paying for and the value of what you are buying has a real ROI. A simple solution that can help you evaluate your data is to download the pertinent information from your collection system into an Excel spreadsheet and create a pivot table within Excel. The key information to validate your data should include vendor, phone number or address returned by vendor, and if you have verified or not verified the new data as good or bad.
Since all vendors will claim to have the best data, the only one who can tell if you are getting the best data from your vendor is you. “Best data” to a vendor can mean the highest number of hits per algorithms used. Only after you have worked the data can you evaluate the true value of what you have bought. Quantity is not necessarily quality.
The pricing and quality of skip tracing data is key to insuring you are running a good and profitable skip tracing department, but there is nothing more important than the security of the data you send to the vendor. As important as it is to evaluate the data you purchase, you must validate all the security you have in place when transmitting your NPI (Non public information) data and the security the vendor has in place to secure your data once it is on their site. There are several security certifications you can look for with a vendor. Some of the major ones are SSAE 16, HIPPA / HITECH, PCI DSS, FISMA and ISO 27002. Most vendors should have several of these certifications. I am a true believer that the more certifications a vendor has obtained, the more serious they are about their system’s security and protecting your data. This is an area where more is better and they can never have too many certifications. Obtaining these certifications is not cheap and it is very time consuming so it may cost you a bit more on a per-record charge, but having a vendor that has obtained security certifications is well worth the additional cost to make sure your data is secured in the long run.
Pricing is important. Quality is important. However, selecting a vendor that has taken care of the security side of their business can be priceless. Verifying that your vendor has taken steps to protect your data and information can help keep your company’s name out of the press.
Brian Cutler is Sr. Director of Business Development at Ontario Systems. Previously he served Sallie Mae as VP of IT and its predecessor Arrow Financial for over 30 year.