Collections Specialist

About This Role

Working within the Debt Management Department, the Collections Specialist maximises cash collections and minimises bad debt through excellent customer service and effective debt recovery processes. This role involves balancing customer needs with business needs within a regulatory framework, focusing on quality, compliance, and exceptional customer service. The position supports customers struggling with energy bills, helping them return to financial health with patience, kindness, and fairness, and offers opportunities for greater ownership within the team.

Responsibilities

• Engage with customers in financial difficulty, communicating with passion across inbound and outbound calls, email, and app contact
• Take payments and negotiate affordable repayment options with customers and their representatives to get the best possible outcome for the customer and the company
• Quickly understand the root cause of customer contact, taking ownership for solving queries (which can be both sensitive and complex in nature) first time by working with other departments
• Process, cleanse, and format data and update systems and records accurately, including external industry bodies
• Adhere to industry compliance and regulations such as the Data Protection Act, Vulnerability Commitment, etc.
• Take ownership for personal and team success by effectively managing your time
• Identify and implement continuous improvements in ways of working within the team and customer service experience
• Take accountability for your own development using the development tools and support provided
• Coach teammates or colleagues from other departments in areas where you have a deeper level of debt knowledge, helping to enhance the overall knowledge across the team and the company
• Complete any other ad-hoc duties as requested by Manager or Head of Department

Requirements

• Excellent and professional customer interaction/telephony skills, delivering a high level of customer service in either face-to-face or office-based roles
• Experience of using multiple IT systems simultaneously with good computer literacy (including Microsoft Office software packages)
• High level of resilience and positivity, managing change in an ever-evolving energy market whilst providing support and reassuring advice to customers facing financial challenges
• Enjoys working with others, building rapport with customers and colleagues, but also thrives independently
• Able to listen, speak, and write confidently and with great attention to detail
• Takes ownership of complex issues, can work with customers or colleagues to find solutions and deliver them in a friendly and timely manner

Nice to have:

• Collections and energy industry experience

Benefits

• Healthcare plan
• Life assurance
• Generous pension contribution
• Volunteering Day
• Various company discounts (including shops, gyms, days out, and events)
• 25 days of holiday (plus bank holidays) and ability to buy/sell days
• Cycle to work scheme
• Car pooling
• Onsite parking available

Important Details

• Schedule: six days a week from 8:30am - 6:00pm, Saturday work required on a rota basis
• Work format: weekly office presence required in Stroud, Gloucestershire, inline with the agreed hybrid working rota

About the Company

Ecotricity is Britain's overall greenest energy company, founded in 1995 as the first company in the world to provide green electricity. Its mission is to change how energy is made and used in Britain by replacing fossil fuels with clean, renewable energy, building windmills and sun parks. Beyond energy, Ecotricity built the Electric Highway, Britain's leading network of electric vehicle charging points; helped Forest Green Rovers become the greenest football club in the world; and launched Ecotalk, Britain's greenest mobile phone service, which uses customer bills to protect and regenerate Britain's lost rainforests.