How to Handle Debt Collection Disputes in the Car Rental Industry

People rely on cars to get from point A to point B. They need them when travelling from the airport to the hotel. Maybe someone doesn’t own a car, but needs to get from their home to some far-flung location that isn’t well serviced by public transit.

Cars are incredibly agile, and they make transporting lots of heavy goods simple. Even if you could take a bus from your home to the cottage, it wouldn’t be very easy to bring all your baggage and coolers.

Every sector has its unique challenges when it comes to collecting debts. The car rental industry has a range of customers, some of whom are itinerant and move around quite a bit. They may rent a car in one city or country, then move back to their own.

Let’s take a look at some of the challenges rental car companies face and how Summit A*R can help get your customers to pay.

Customers Move Around

A car rental company located in one country may have a hard enough time collecting debts from a local customer. It gets even harder when the debtor lives in a different city or country.

Such a distance can pose technical and logistical headaches for debt collectors. What if they can’t even locate the debtor? The debt collection professionals in our skip tracing department are a game-changer because it’s led by a fully licensed private investigator.

Our investigator can quickly find not only the debtor, but also their assets. They have more tools in their toolkit because they don’t just rely on the free resources that other skip tracing departments use. Their skills, experiences, and tools result in effectively and efficiently locating the debtor.

Once they find them, they get results quickly because they know how to press the right buttons; they will report your customers to the credit bureaus, which significantly changes their calculations. If a delinquent debtor feels like not paying the debt is cheaper for them, they’re unlikely to pay. However, once they realize that not paying the debt will greatly increase the cost of getting a loan in the future, and making securing one more challenging, they’re likely to pay up.

It’s very hard to find a skip tracing department run by a licensed private investigator. Summit A*R is one of the only debt collection companies in the US that has one! We also offer their services at no extra cost, so you can sit back, confident that debtors will be located.

Ethical and Friendly

Let’s face it. Debt collectors don’t always have a wonderful reputation in the public’s imagination. Hollywood movies tend to depict the industry quite badly, and, sometimes, real live debt collectors resort to underhanded tactics to try to collect debts. Summit A*R takes the exact opposite approach!

We take pride in our PHD philosophy — preserve human dignity. Our trained negotiators working on your accounts try to be genuinely helpful towards everyone they work with. They’re never combative or rude to debtors. Instead, they try to find for them the best path forward, so everybody can move on quickly.

Tactics like robocalls, late-night calls, and aggressive or threatening language fail for several reasons. On a basic level, they don’t push debtors to actually make their payments. We know this because we avoid these methods and collect nearly double the industry average.

Plus, even if they did work, they push debtors away from doing business with you in the future. You don’t want to collect a debt at the expense of burning a bridge. Summit A*R lets you get the best of both worlds by collecting more debt sooner while leaving your working relationships in a healthy state.

Unclear Language

Sometimes, car companies can prevent disputes from arising by ensuring that the language in the agreements that customers sign is totally clear. There shouldn’t be any hidden clauses or charges that cause people to be surprised and upset later.

Transparency and clarity help to keep everybody on the same page. When people feel blindsided by a charge they didn’t expect, they may not be forthcoming with payments.

Helping to ensure there’s total alignment right from the start of the process can help prevent these types of clogs. As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

In addition to working hard to collect your debts, Summit A*R can also work closely with you to improve your internal debt collection processes. We have lots of experience helping customers reduce or avoid delinquency and write-offs.

Contact us about our consulting services, as our account receivable management professionals will learn the ins and outs of your car rental business before recommending the best way to increase cash flow and improve customer retention, all while reducing bad debt loss.

Car rental companies waiting for customers to pay them money that should already be in their accounts can feel like the equivalent of a driver getting stuck in traffic — they’re wasting valuable time, and every additional moment is agonizing. Connecting with Summit A*R to boost your internal processes is a great way to strengthen the core of your business.

Providing debt collection for rental car companies is something we do effectively and routinely. It’s important to pull back and take a holistic look at the macro situation; we don’t accept any excuses for unpaid debt, so if we can help collect one or two debts, that’s fine. But if you have a recurring underlying problem that a few tweaks can solve, that’s a much more fundamental and long-lasting solution.

Most North American cities are designed for people to get around by driving. Whether somebody is brand new to a city or they’ve lived there all their life, they may need to rent a car to around. It’s a great business model, and it’s a popular service used by millions of people. If your car rental company needs help collecting debts, call Summit A*R today.