In this week’s article on Operational Insights, we will be sharing the 4 functional departments that make up KX-Unit. The 4 departments are: Sales Department, Administrative Department, Operations Department, and Marketing and Communication Department. All of the departments play a critical role in KX-Unit’s day-to-day function and they are therefore highly synergized to support, compliment, supplement each other in the various cases entrusted to KX-Unit.

The Sales Department is often where the workflow begins. New cases are sought after, addressed, finalized, and thoroughly handed over to the Administrative Department for processing. Customer enquiries are answered as we provide the initial consultancy with our prospective clients; to address some of their pressing concerns, understand from them the origin of the debt, and the story of the debt. These are important information, which will be attained and handed over to the Administrative Department subsequently to be collated for the Operations Department to have oversight in their negotiations.

The staffs in the Sales Department have to be patience, professional, and sensitive. It is not uncommon to meet frustrated clients. The staffs also need to ensure that they are getting the best information from our clients, even if it means prying into private life issues. The rationale is to ensure that our Operations Department will have the best edge when we negotiate. In all, the Sales Department will provide assessment on the case after understanding about it, start initial solution planning with our clients, and anticipate in a forward looking manner the potential pitfalls of the various preliminary plans. When these are finalized and the client is agreeable, the information will be captured by our Administrative Department.

The Administrative Department serves a role similar to that of a central command cell. The synergy of the information and relevance to the various departments are optimized here. KX-Unit’s digitization to use technology has also facilitated this process.
In simple terms, the Administrative Department process the documents received from the Sales Department for Operation use. They look ahead for the standard needs of an operation team and ensure that these are prepared from the get-go. Some of these documents include the Proof of Debt, warrant to act, Letter of Demand and more. Before an operation, the Administrative Department would have already organized and pre-stored a folder for that particular case with all the information needed by the operations team. This is also the benefit of going electronic, as various departments are able to optimize their time, effort and focus on their necessary role.

As the central processing department, all information that flows through will be scrutinized again to ensure that there are no discrepancies or anomalies. Once done, a Profile Search will be initiated by the Administrative Department based on the information of the Sales Department to value add to the Operation Department. Information like the debtor’s last known whereabouts, exact business address, residential address, license plate number, etc. will be acquired lawfully if possible, for the Operations Department to use where needed.

By now, the information has been well fused and optimized for an actual operation. The Operations Department receives this information and initiates the first few interactions with the debtor. They plan for on-the-ground tactics and contingencies based on the case profile they have received. Before every operation, they will speak to the Sales and Administrative department to clarify the case situation, if any. Most of the time these inter-sharing can happen at the man-to-man level, as our Sales and Operations offices are only 2 levels away.

Once the Operations Department is confident about the information, legal documents, and debtor’s whereabouts, they will proceed with the operations. They will serve a Letter of Demand to the debtor and actively engage discussion. However, every case is different and the Operations Department will have to temper their ground approaches to ensure that they achieve the best outcome for our client. For simple cases, KX-Unit has an established Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to follow. For the more complex cases, especially those that are potentially sensitive, more pre-ops planning will be accorded. As negotiations on the ground are highly dynamic, the Operations Department must have the patience, sharpness, mission-focus, empathy and perseverance to achieve the best outcome. We deal with debtors who may actively evade us, lie to us, malign us, and even sue us. The Operations Department must be 2 to 3 steps ahead to anticipate and correct such instances, and bring the negotiation back to the topic again.

When a debt is successfully recovered, we will provide the debtor with a Settlement form to certify that the debt is paid and fully cleared. In other cases, an installment form will be provided. This is to safeguard the debtor’s as well, and is only fair.

The Marketing and Communications Department looks at how we interact with the general public, and takes care of KX-Unit’ s public responses. With every case we undertake, are exposed to, and solve, KX-Unit achieves more experience and knowledge. But knowledge is only useful if it can be collated and presented in digestible bits for others to learn. Knowledge management in KX-Unit is a strong culture; we often share what was done right and wrong, what can be better, what was unique about a case and more. Once these lessons are learnt, we ask ourselves: is there anything that we can do to share with the general public to generate awareness? After all, we deal with many scam cases and with the rise of scam cases today, it would do more good than harm to share some knowledge with the public.

The Marketing and Communications Department also share with the general public about the Debt Collection industry in general, to create more awareness about an industry that is often easily mistaken. More specifically, we share how KX-Unit is progressing, think and re-think the ethics of our profession, share about our job scope, our services, our humble beginnings and more. Whenever KX-unit takes on a case that is featured on the mass media, the Marketing and Communications Department also crafts our own Press Release to be posted on our Facebook Page for our stakeholders to read and understand from our perspective. The Department also responds to Facebook messages and post replies to comments.

Ultimately, the various departments have an organic role to play independently, but they are synergized to serve our client’s best interest with the utmost professionalism and commitment to quality service. The rigor and integrity of KX-Unit’s systems, checks and balances, documentation, knowledge management, and knowledge sharing serves to do the best that we can for our client, our staffs, and for the public. The many cases that KX-Unit has undertaken have provided us with the procedural foresight to take the right move at the right time for our client’s best interest. Feel free to contact KX-Unit at +65 6291 3656 or +65 8112 7790 or drop us a mail at enquiries@KX-Unit.com if you have any queries on past cases or about the services we offer. You can also visit our website at http://www.KX-Unit.com/