Case Study: Capital Management Services

Capital Management Services grows six-fold in three years with Castel dialers. Castel dialers enable agents to exceed client expectations.

One way successful collections companies get that way is by positioning themselves for continual growth. How? By implementing the infrastructure—in terms of both staff and technology—that enables growth to occur seamlessly, cost-effectively, and in a timely fashion. Capital Management Services, Inc., one of the fastest growing receivables management firms in the country, is a case in point.

“Our corporate vision,” says Dan Abadir, president and COO of Capital Management Services (CMS), “is based on the fundamental premise that we will always have additional growth because we are determined to lead the industry in delivering the best services with the greatest value for our clients. Our six-fold revenue increase over the last three years has proven the value of this approach.”

Launched in 2000 in Buffalo, New York, with an executive management team having over 60 years of collective experience in debt recovery management, CMS saw early on that a key component to meeting their growth goals was a feature-rich, scalable predictive dialer that was easy for agents to use. “These goals quickly led us to Castel,” says Stephen Florczak, Executive Vice President of Information Technology
at CMS. “Dialer companies come and go, but Castel has a 24 year-history of meeting the needs of the collections industry with continually updated technology. Equally important, their vision of the industry mirrors our own, with an emphasis on customer satisfaction and value.”

Another factor that drove CMS to select Castel dialers was market penetration. “In Buffalo, the major hub for collections activities in the country, Castel is the only way to go because it is favored by so many
agencies and agents here,” says Larry Costa, CMS’ Senior Vice President of Business Development. “As a result, utilizing Castel dialers enables us to attract the highly skilled agents who can deliver results that exceed our clients’ expectations.”

Castel Connects® Protects

CMS currently has two Castel Connects predictive dialers; one in each of two redundant contact centers in Buffalo. “By duplicating resources we meet two objectives,” Florczak explains. “First, we ensure business continuity for our clients since each site can fail-over to the next in a matter of seconds. And second, with two locations it is easier for agents to get to work. In fact, none of our agents at either site has to commute longer than 20 minutes. This is an important issue for us because we believe that satisfied agents are critical to protecting our clients’ best interests— and to meeting business goals.” Client satisfaction is also protected through CMS’ emphasis on regulatory compliance. “We operate in an industry governed by federal guideline, for clients that are also pressured by regulatory demands,” Florczak says. “ So audit trails and compliance are critical for us. In fact, this was another reason we selected Castel dialers: their reporting capabilities are second to none, and no matter how configured, they will always meet or beat the maximum federal abandonment rate of three percent, with virtually no impact on throughput.”

Castel Connects® Works

Castel Connects also delivers the high performance CMS needs to fulfill growth and client service objectives. For starters, with Castel, integration of the dialer with collections software is seamless. “The seamless integration of our dialer with our collections software is a key reason we are able to minimize IT management overhead,” Florczak says. “It’s recommended that an IT shop for a company our size should have 25-30 support staff, but, thanks to Castel Connects, we do just fine with 18.”

Efficiency and productivity are also ensured at CMS because of Castel’s performance. “Castel Connects dials numbers twice as fast as competing dialers,” says Florczak. “This is a critical benefit for us because our call volumes, currently at 1.2 million contacts each month, continue to increase. In addition,  Castel Connects has an extremely short wait time of 10-15 seconds; by comparison other dialers we looked at typically had wait times of 30 seconds or more when transferring calls to agents. This means that not only can we dial more calls per hour, but our agents can complete more calls and thereby exceed client expectations.”

The ability of Castel Connects to determine when calls are actually answered with 100 percent accuracy also adds to the overall power of the solution for CMS. “Other dialers have error rates of one to two percent, that is, they erroneously report connects, when no connection is made,” Florczak says. “At our current 1.2 million contacts per month, that would translate into an enormous amount of wasted agent time. But with CastelConnects we complete 1.2 million contacts because the dialer makes no errors.”

Castel Connects® Future-Proofs

To CMS, meeting growth strategy is more than simply accommodating increasing calling volumes cost- effectively. Beyond the basics, the company is also looking to continually enhance services, always extending functionality to meet the evolving needs of their expanding client base. A call recording solution will soon be integrated with Castel Connects, for example, as will a software add-in that delivers predictive modeling capabilities based on historical calling patterns.

“Castel Connects is an engine that has driven our growth for the past three years and that will continue to do so long into the future,” Costa says. “At the end of the day, CMS is measured by how much money our agents collect for ourclients. Castel Connects has proven itself a worthy ally in future-proofing our ability to grow, by optimizing call volumes, call connects, and agent productivity. The bottom line here is that thanks to our dialer, our bottom line is strong and growing stronger.”