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Diana Eagen, Esker’s Director of Sales for Order-to-Cash sat down with Kim Cole, Director of Collections, at LocumTenens.com to talk about their past year during the pandemic.
Healthcare staffing is critical not just for businesses, but for the country as a whole given some of the obstacles we’ve faced – namely, a shortage of healthcare workers. Esker customer LocumTenens.com specializes in the temporary placement of physicians, CRNAs, physician assistants, nurse practitioners and psychologists at healthcare facilities across the U.S. As the industry’s most-visited job board, LocumTenens.com helps healthcare organizations connect with the professionals they need to ensure patients have access to quality care, and it’s been a busy 14 months for the company.
It’s the collections team’s responsibility to stay ahead of bad debt and apply strategies to ensure outstanding debt is recovered in the most time- and cost-effective way. That hill has been a steep one to climb for most credit and collections leaders the past year. Kim Cole, the Director of Collections at LocumTenens.com, has kept her cool during a challenging year and has focused on keeping track of outstanding receivables, collecting payments and guiding customers through the payment process. I had the opportunity to ask Kim about the Locumtenens.com AR team and how she’s been able to effectively manage collections efforts like a well-oiled machine with Esker automation.
Diana Eagen: Kim, thank you so much for taking the time to provide insights into your cash collections. First, how is your team? With the vaccine and some restrictions now lifting, are employees (still) working remote or in the office?
Kim Cole: We were remote at the start of the pandemic for several months. It is critically important to our company to ensure the health and wellbeing of our associates. At this point in time, we have many associates back in the office half of the week and several associates that continue to work remote.
Diana Eagen: We both know that inefficient accounts receivable management can unnecessarily tie up your company’s working capital, so effectiveness is critical. Has your organization adjusted its collections strategy or done anything different to meet your business objectives since the COVID-19 pandemic?
Kim Cole: LocumTenens.com is a staffing agency in the healthcare industry. Our mission is to improve healthcare by providing patients with access to quality medical care through innovative staffing solutions. Like many other healthcare organizations this past year, we felt a significant impact as customers reacted to the pandemic environment. We reached out via Esker messaging to communicate to our customers that as valued partners, we would assist them any way we could to help them get through this difficult time.
Diana Eagen: I’m sure your customers were very thankful for that. Have you found that your business has been resilient enough to recover from any impact the crisis has made on LocumTenens.com?
Kim Cole: Our resilience and purpose has helped us navigate through this pandemic, and Esker has helped us achieve our collection goals and mitigate risk. We were able to quickly add new data fields that assisted us in looking at our aging through diverse segmentations, which really helped us prioritize.
Diana Eagen: Was your DSO or customers’ average time to pay impacted?
Kim Cole: We found little impact on our DSO or ADP despite the challenging times.
Diana Eagen: Wow, that’s fantastic! Not every company made the adjustments needed to thrive – some are still struggling. How have you factored in the historical relationship with your customers when planning collections follow up and credit decision?
Kim Cole: We have worked with both existing customers and new customers to staff the front lines of this pandemic. Our locum providers have staffed in all areas of the U.S., working tirelessly to support the hospitals and clinics through this unprecedented time. We always look at credit risk in our decision making for new business and follow the credit reporting for all of our customers.
Diana Eagen: What guidelines do you provide to help “good” customers remain in good standing, and what makes a good customer to you?
Kim Cole: A good customer communicates effectively with us to resolve disputes and eventually resolve the outstanding invoices for payment. We have strategized with several customers in order to help them make payments and reduce their outstanding receivables.
Diana Eagen: Over the past 14 months did your organization have to institute or remove penalty fees for late payment or offer early payment discounts as a standard practice?
Kim Cole: We worked with our customers at the beginning of the pandemic to help them with the financial impact they felt as a result in the reduction of normal health maintenance procedures due to COVID-19 by not assessing finance fees.
Diana Eagen: From a customer experience perspective, did you implement anything new or make it any easier for your customers to do business with you or get paid faster?
Kim Cole: We did! In April, we began the process of contracting through Wind River Financial for credit card processing. Our goal was to provide our customers with every resource for payment during these challenging times in healthcare. Our customers love that they have different ways to pay their outstanding receivables now in their customer portal.
Conclusion
With the help of AR automation and the efficiency-boosting tools it provides, LocumTenens.com was able to quickly adjust to unprecedented circumstances and work with customers being impacted by the pandemic to continue collecting payments, while seamlessly transitioning to a remote workplace and providing great customer service. If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught businesses anything, it’s that there’s no predicting what will happen in the future. The best way companies can be prepared for whatever comes their way is to have the proper tools in place that promote efficiency, flexibility and business continuity — tools like AI-driven automation.