Ten seconds: that's how long it takes for a collections call to succeed or fail.

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Not the negotiation. Not the payment plan. The first ten seconds, when the person answering the phone decides whether they are speaking to a professional, a pushover, or a problem.

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Get those seconds wrong and everything after them gets harder. Get them right and you have set the tone for a call that ends with an amount, a date and a method, agreed by a customer who feels they were dealt with fairly.

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That is why we have just rolled out a new internal training file across our collections and phone teams: 'Assertive on the Line'. And because the people on those phones are speaking on behalf of our clients, we think you should see what goes into it.

Assertive is not aggressive

Our industry has a language problem. Too many operations treat 'assertive' and 'aggressive' as points on the same dial, as if firmness were just politeness with the volume turned up.

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They are not the same discipline. They are not even going in the same direction.

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A passive call has no chance. The customer senses the account is not a priority, a vague promise to call back is accepted, and the balance drifts another month closer to write-off.

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An aggressive call loses the customer. It invites complaints, creates regulatory exposure, and in 2026, with the Consumer Duty setting the bar for 'Fair Outcomes', it is simply not a viable way to operate. It never was a decent one.

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The assertive call sits in neither camp. It is clear about the debt, courteous to the person, and in control of the conversation. That combination is a skill, and skills are trained, not assumed.

What the training covers

The file runs to seven pages, built the way we build everything: practical, specific, and honest about where the failure points are.

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The distinction. Passive, assertive and aggressive, side by side, so every agent can hear the difference in a single line of dialogue.

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The voice. Authority on the telephone is mostly delivery. Pace, downward inflection, and the confidence to hold a silence after the question has been asked. We also train our people to write and speak for a nine to eleven reading age, because that is the level at which the average UK adult processes language. Plain English is not dumbing down. It is the most assertive register there is.

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The language. Seven specific phrase swaps that take the hedge out of a call without taking the respect out of it. "Would you maybe be able to pay something?" becomes "How will you be clearing the balance today?" Same courtesy. Different outcome.

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The structure. Every call has a four-stage spine: open, position, negotiate, close. A close without an amount, a date and a method is not a commitment. It is a postponement.

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The pressure points. The shouter, the staller, the disputer, the silent one, and, treated entirely differently, the vulnerable customer, where assertiveness gives way to care, procedure and escalation. A payment secured from someone who could not freely agree it is a failure, not a result.

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The lines we never cross. No threats we cannot or will not carry out. No excessive contact. No account details to third parties. No pressing a customer in difficulty. These are not aspirations. They are the conditions of the job.

Why we invest in this

We have been tracing debtors and recovering assets since 1999, and one lesson has held for the whole of that time: the quality of a recovery operation is the quality of its conversations.

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You can have the best data, the best 'forensic tracing', the right address where a standard trace found the wrong one. But the moment the phone connects, all of that hands over to a human being and their next sentence. Technology finds the customer. People recover the balance.

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That is also why this matters to the clients whose names our calls carry. When we speak to your customers, we are your brand for the length of that call. Complaint rates, 'Fair Outcomes' evidence, and the simple question of how your customers are treated when they are at their most stretched: all of it runs through the standard of the person on the line.

See the standard for yourself

If you place accounts with a collections or recovery partner, ask them one question: show me how you train your people on the telephone. The answer tells you more than any pitch deck.

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We are happy to be held to that test.

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Talk to us about how we handle your customers. Book a no-obligation conversation and we will walk you through our approach to collections calls, our vulnerability procedures, and how we evidence fair treatment on every account we touch.

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And if you are also sitting on a population of 'goneaway' accounts that a standard trace could not resolve, ask us about a forensic tracing review at the same time. Finding the right person and speaking to them properly are two halves of the same job. We do both.

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Get in touch at towerhallsolutions.com or connect with Glenn Matthews FCICM on LinkedIn.

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Towerhall Solutions has provided forensic debtor tracing and asset recovery to more than 70 institutions and legal entities since 1999, with a 80% tracing success rate and £97m recovered.

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