Well, bascially I work for a collection agency here. I'm pretty good with persuation techniques when I'm meeting with someone face-to-face, but such a thing often (if not always) requires rapport, even if only subtle rapport. With a sales situation, one is almost always faced with the situation in person. With collections, this is almost never the case. 98% of the work is done by phone.

My question is how effective would language patterns/NLP in general be in the environment of collections? This considering that in most cases, the person you are trying to contact with is generally not wanting to hear from you from the very start. Gaining rapport is easy in many cases, but is it enough to be able to use NLP by phone successfully?