It’s tougher than ever to get through to a live voice on the phone. Caller ID and voice mail make it easy for people to screen calls or ignore them in lieu of a more convenient time. And getting a return call? Don’t hold your breath.

For collectors, that challenge is magnified ten-fold.

Communication specialists recommend all kinds of creative strategies to get a phone call returned. Of course, there’s no sure-fire solution and in fact, one idea we heard recently struck us as simply wrong: Leaving a bogus message that states that you’re returning their call.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes for a minute. You’re extremely busy. You hear that message and assume that, because you can’t remember, you must have placed a call to this person as the message states. You spend the next 5 or 10 minutes racking your brain and flipping through notes trying to remember this person and why you called them.

When you do finally return the call, you realize you’ve been tricked. So not only have you wasted time trying to remember the initial phone call that never happened, now you’re caught off guard in a clear deception.

As the customer, are you going to feel any desire whatsoever to work with this collector?

Absolutely not. In reality, you’re more likely to put that bill at the bottom of the stack out of sheer anger and frustration.

No one ever says to a collector, “Oh! I’m SO glad you called!” By nature, these calls are adversarial. Therefore, collectors must find a way to overcome the negative stereotypes in order to make headway on the debt. Trickery and deception build walls and make the task far more difficult.

Don’t do it. No matter how many messages you have to leave for a delinquent customer, be truthful.