Empereon Launches Constar Collections Group

 
Empereon Marketing, LLC, a company that provides contact center services to major U.S. newspaper groups and to cable and broadband companies nationwide, expanded this week into the collections market with the launch of Constar Financial Services.

“What we’ve done since we started Empereon 10 years ago is provide services with the most net back to our end client,” Travis Bowley, CEO and founding partner of Empereon, told insideARM.com. Bowley said that Emperion will apply its technology, agent training and other factors to the Constar venture.

“We’ve put a lot of our money back into our technology,” Bowley said, citing automated dialers, management information statistics and analytical technology as among the companies strengths that have benefited its clients.

However, the new affiliate will be targeting automotive lenders and other consumer finance firms to build its collections business, he said. “The need for collections always runs in cycles. There’s a big need for it now and there will be more as the years go by.”

He expects that need to be increasingly filled by third party firms rather than creditors hiring additional staff and investing in the communications technology to do the collections themselves.

While the default issues in the subprime mortgage market are well known, credit card issuers have reported little uptick in bad credit. In Constar’s consumer finance target market, there has been an increase in early stage delinquencies, “an area we specialize in,” according to Yvonne Torrijos, Constar’s chief marketing officer.

Constar reports it will draw on the automated call centers that Emperion has in place to provide efficient collections, including metrics to show the best times to call debtors, prioritization of debtors to call and similar efficiencies.

Constar is operating at four regional call centers, thus eliminating the need for agents to be “Americanized” to be effective, as happens with some offshore agents, according to Bowley.

The regional call centers are in areas with low cost labor pools, though not as low cost as some offshore and near-shore locations, Bowley acknowledges. “We’re not the cheapest in terms of cost, but we’re the most effective in terms of net back to our clients.”