ABSTRACT
In Yada and Matsumura (2006), the problem of collecting overdue payments related to Japan’s telecommunications companies is discussed. For these companies, operators contact negligent customers and negotiate these overdue payments. The success of such negotiations depends to a large extent on the persuasion skills of individual operators. In 2007, because of an organizational problem, more than half of the experienced employees left the company. Thus it became necessary for company managers to act quickly to transfer these special, but tacit, unrecorded skills of successful operators to other employees. The authors divided the current employees into those with good collection skills and those with bad collection skills and analyzed the actual verbal content and structure to determine the factors that might account for differences in their levels of success and to discover ways to transfer this newly discovered knowledge.
