Early-stage collections for a regional Australian telecommunications provider

The provider's small Australian collections team, 9 staff, was responsible for every stage of arrears management, from the first missed payment reminder through to hardship arrangements and disputed accounts. Early-stage, low-complexity arrears calls and straightforward payment plan negotiations were consuming most of the team's time, leaving hardship cases and complex disputes waiting longer than the provider wanted for a response.

The engagement started with 15 collections agents and 1 team leader on first-stage arrears calls only. It grew to 35 agents, 3 team leaders, a quality assurance specialist and a dedicated compliance liaison over four months as scope extended to second-stage arrears and structured payment plan negotiation, with the compliance liaison responsible for flagging any call showing signs of financial hardship straight to the Australian team. Every hardship indicator or dispute is escalated immediately, never handled offshore.

Offshore delivery from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, handling first and second-stage arrears contact and routine payment plan negotiation only.

Disclosing customer account and payment information to the Vietnam team engages Australian Privacy Principle 8 and section 16C of the Privacy Act 1988, and the provider's compliance function retained accountability for the offshore team's data handling rather than treating it as delegated away. Reasonable steps included restricting agent access to arrears status and payment history only, with no visibility into unrelated account or product data, and contractual audit rights over the Vietnam operation's data handling practices. Given the provider's customer base and revenue, the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme applied, and breach assessment procedures were built into the collections workflow from the outset. Every agent worked from an approved call script and complaint-handling procedure, and any customer indicating hardship, confusion about their account, or a dispute over the debt itself was moved off the collections queue and handed to the Australian team within the same call wherever possible, never pressured to commit to a payment plan on the spot. Corpshore's security practices are aligned with the Essential Eight framework.

The proportion of early-stage arrears accounts resolved through a payment plan within 14 days of first contact rose from 41 percent to 63 percent. Average handle time on first-stage arrears calls fell by 19 percent as agents specialised in the workflow rather than switching between arrears stages and hardship cases. The Australian team's hardship case backlog fell by roughly half within the first quarter of steady state, since it was no longer also carrying the full early-stage arrears volume. Cost per early-stage arrears contact fell by approximately 52 percent against the prior in-house-only model. Figures quoted exclude GST.

Splitting easy arrears calls from hardship calls, rather than asking one team to do both, is what let the offshore team specialise and the Australian team finally keep pace with the cases that actually needed judgment.