Commercial Credit Manager of the Year - 31 March 2001
Mark Evans, collection manager for Yell, picks up this year’s award for his ability to clear a backlog of complaints in just two weeks while reducing the company’s DSO to an all time low.Mark heads up a team of 19 people within the customer service team responsible for billing and collection across all Yell portfolios. The team handles more than 800,000 invoices totalling around £500m per year, issued to over 350,000 customers.
In addition to managing relationships with suppliers such as debt collection agencies, insolvency practitioners and solicitors, Mark’s responsibilities expanded to include more specialist Yellow Pages’ products such as The Business Database, Servicecall and Europages following a recent reorganisation within the department. He was quick to acquire the necessary product knowledge and developed collection strategies for individual products, each of which has its own different payment terms.
His major achievements include reducing days of sales outstanding (DSO) for Yellow Pages and Business Pages, by 2 days, to a record low figure and subsequently reducing DSO for Yell products, such as Yell.com, by 19 days. He increased collection rates by 6 per cent last year, and cut the amount of work referred to a debt collection agency by a third, while reducing costs by 20 per cent.
Instrumental in helping the Customer Service Team establish a ‘one touch’ approach to customer contact, Mark encouraged his staff to embrace the changes - this produced impressive results. His team cleared a backlog of complex queries in just two weeks, despite being relatively new to the task, having only completed initial training a few days earlier.
Senior credit manager, Cathy Johnson, said: “Mark’s ‘hands-on’ approach to coaching, individual case resolution and team communications, ensured we rose to the task in hand. As a team, we have successfully eliminated ‘hot spots’ that delay collection.”
Mark is happy to have won the award and cites one of the high points of his job as when persistently difficult cases are resolved. “Then you realise it is worth all the effort. We have made good progress in tightening up operations which would not have been possible without the hard effort and co-operation of my team.”
