By Anica Cunanan, Solicitor at Matthews Folbigg in the Insolvency, Restructuring and Debt Recovery Group
An effective debt collection system is critical to businesses who provide goods or services “on credit”. But how to go about debt collection whilst still trying to maintain good customer relationships?
In our experience, nothing poisons a business relationship like bad debt collection. At the risk of sounding heretical, sometimes the customer is not right, when they simply refuse to pay for no reason. The value of such customer relationship might be doubted, and the method debt collection may not matter. But in other cases, the customer just needs a gentle (or possibly less gentle!) debt collection technique. In all cases, the question is this: How does a business continue to manage a customer relationship whilst ensuring that their account is paid on time? [...]
