Atradius collections gains CICMQ
 

Atradius Collections (www.atradiuscollections.com), the collections arm of trade credit insurer, Atradius (www.atradius.co.uk) has become the sole collections agency awarded accreditation from the Chartered Institute of Credit Management (CICM) (www.cicm.com).

The CICMQ is the credit management industry’s best practice accreditation, recognizing an outstanding commitment to quality, continuous improvement and best practice in all things credit.  Becoming one of just 50 CICM accredited companies, Atradius Collections is the only member which is a collections agency and the first ever cross-functional team to have made the cut. It is also the first to have undertaken the award process completely virtually.

The CICMQ accreditation encompasses a range of areas and policies, including credit policy, compliance, customer services, staff development, performance measurement and stakeholder management.  The intensive and rigorous process undertaken by Atradius Collections spanned over nine months including review and planning workshops to identify long-term goals for improvement, a cash-challenge month and comprehensive assessments.

“The Atradius Collections Team are a dynamic group of people.  When I'm assessing an organization for CICMQ accreditation, I look for a number of attributes such as consistency in approach, quality of information and professionalism,” says Pam Thomas, CICMQ Assessor.  “This team delivers on all levels and rightly deserve the accreditation. The results achieved over a very difficult trading year is inspiring with stakeholders impressed at their determination to provide excellent service.”  

After achieving the accreditation award, Atradius Collections will complete a review after 18 months to ensure it is continuing to uphold its first-class standards with the entire process repeated every three years to renew the status.

“We are genuinely thrilled to have been awarded the highly-sought after and renowned CICMQ accreditation,” comments Yvette Gray, Regional Manager of Atradius Collections UK and Ireland.  “As our customers are often credit managers themselves, we want them to know that we understand their business and what’s important to them.  This gold standard in industry accreditation allows us to demonstrate to customers as well as the wider credit management industry the strength of our expertise, robustness of our processes and that we operate at the highest level.”

Starting the process as the coronavirus pandemic hit, Atradius Collections was the first company to embark on an entirely virtual accreditation journey; one that has now been rolled out to new CICMQ applicants.

“At the beginning, working remotely was very new to everybody but we didn’t want it to hold us back.  If anything, we saw it as an opportunity to come together as a team, to be innovative and embrace new ways of working and completing the CICMQ was no exception,” continues Gray.  “The entire team pulled together to earn this fantastic achievement and I’m personally so proud of how much has been accomplished during this process.”

Chris Sanders, head of accreditation CICMQ at the CICM, added: “It was a pleasure to work with the excellent Atradius Collections team.  We could not have wished for a more motivated, engaged and completely cross-functional team to be the first to successfully complete the new CICMQ Workshop Programme completely remotely.  The team embraced the latest online collaborative tools and virtual breakout rooms for the workshop activity, Atradius were a great team of high-performing credit professionals to have as 'first adopters’ and we had great fun taking them through the process.  The successful accreditation is well deserved.”