What’s it like to work as a debt collector
Back in November 2021, I decided to apply to a job as a “Customer Service” representative. While this is what my company does, I ended up getting put in the Collection’s team. Not counting the two weeks of training, I have now been working as a debt collector for a month and I can point out the benefits, and the caveats of having a job like this.
Responsibilities
My responsibilities consist of:
- Calling clients over the phone
- Processing or scheduling payments over the phone
- Dispatch calls with reason for delinquency
- Answer client’s questions regarding their account or the company
All without failing compliance.
Caveats
Physically and technically, anyone could do this job. Mentally, you need to be able to handle abuse, because people will abuse you over the phone. We get it. Nobody wants to be called at Saturday 8am about a loan. But the thing is, had the client paid their loan in time (or maybe not taken it out in the first place), neither the client nor the debt collector would be in this situation. This is the point at which I realized I’m making money off of people’s poor financial decisions. And upon trying to help them, I get cussed out. Makes sense.
The second caveat of working this job is the software. 2/3 times you make an action such as pressing a button, it does not work. It blows my mind that a billion dollar company is running on software which doesn’t work more than half the time.
Advantages
There’s a lot of down time during which you can do basically anything else. I’m quite literally getting paid to take online courses and learn web design, to practice bass guitar, or to create more gif emotes for my group chats. I’m positive I have become a more productive person working this job than when I was unemployed. Updating this blog would not be possible if it wasn’t for this job. So I’m thankful for it.
Lastly, the job pay is okay. $16/hr is not great, but for the amount of work I get done during down-time without it feeling like a waste of time, I say it’s pretty worth it. The job itself is a dead end. How you use your time during the down-time is not.
