A debt collection notice lies on the kitchen table. At the bottom is a phone number. Under Norway's new Debt Collection Act, it is no longer optional for it to be there.
The act was sanctioned on 22 May this year and replaces the previous act from 1988. It has not yet entered into force – the date is set by royal decree, and the authorities have signalled 1 January 2027 – but it is far more specific than the old one about how a collection agency should speak to the people it is collecting from. The agency must be reachable by phone, and the number and phone hours must appear in collection notices and payment demands and on the agency's website (section 15). Enquiries from debtors must be answered as soon as possible and no later than within one week (section 17). And communication must be “polite, proper, understandable, discreet and reasonably adapted to the debtor”.
For a collection agency considering a voice agent on that number, it pays to walk through one entirely ordinary call and see where the law has an opinion. Here it is, in seven moments.
1. The phone rings at 20:40
She calls after the children are in bed, because that is when she has some peace. That is a point in itself: the law requires availability, and an agent that answers in the evening is available at the time the debtor actually calls.
The first sentence must say who she has reached, and that she is talking to an AI. The latter is a requirement, not a courtesy.
2. “Who are you?”
She gives the case number from the letter. That is not enough. A case number is printed on a sheet of paper lying on a kitchen table, and the caller could just as well be her partner, a grown-up son or a neighbour who opened the wrong envelope.
“Discreet” means something quite specific here: the agent must not state the amount, the creditor or what the claim concerns until it knows it is speaking to the debtor. The usual fix is to ask for something more – a date of birth, or the last digits of a national ID number. That works poorly on the phone. Speech recognition is still unreliable on long strings of digits, especially over a phone line, and an agent that hears “nineteen eighty-four” as “nineteen eighty-five” either turns away the right debtor or – worse – lets the wrong person in.
So identification should not happen by voice at all. Our approach is to move it into Vipps, the app most Norwegians already use to identify themselves: the agent sends a request to the app on the phone she is calling from, she confirms with a tap while still on the call, and only then does the case open. There are no numbers to read out, and nobody can guess their way in with a case number from an envelope. Still decide what the agent says when the confirmation doesn’t come – she is calling from another phone, or she doesn’t want to – because that call will come too.
3. “How much is it, actually?”
The amount has changed since the letter was written: interest, fees, perhaps a part-payment last week. This is one of the few questions in a collection call that genuinely requires a lookup in the case management system.
If the agent does not have that lookup, it should say so, not work its way to a number. An amount read out in a calm voice sounds just as certain whether it is right or not.
4. “But I’ve already paid”
The call has now become a dispute, and the law requires written procedures for how disputes and complaints are handled. The agent’s job is not to assess whether she is right. It should record what she says, in her own words, tell her what happens next – and never argue.
The worst version is an agent set up from a sales template to “handle objections”. What is an objection in a sale is a disputed claim in debt collection.
