June 19th, 2018 | Billy Greenblatt, CEO and Chairman, Sterling
Excellence is the Result of Always Striving to Do Better
When I first started Sterling, getting court records was a tedious process requiring manual retrieval and review. It could take weeks or even months. I knew that this wouldn’t do for our clients. They needed to get the information quickly and accurately.
We shook up the industry and developed the first technology to automate court records collection, CourtDirect. At the time customers would ask me if we were actually conducting the checks, they didn’t believe it because turnaround was so quick. We also knew that quality was important, so we set out to find more efficient and effective processes for casting a wider net for searches. Complete Criminal Locator now helps our clients uncover thousands of convictions they would not have found otherwise, keeping more criminals out of our homes and workplaces. These innovations helped us build a business where speed and quality are paramount – and we have the best of both.
Smart Data Technology
But those of you who know me know that I’m never satisfied, and I’ve instilled this in our company culture. Always strive to be better. So, we delivered more innovation through our proprietary AI technology called Smart Data. Smart Data associates only relevant criminal information from courts in an automated way and delivered other improvements to our fulfillment processes.
The results have been extraordinary and I’m thrilled to share them.
In the past year, we’ve increased the speed of our criminal searches by 40%. We did this by thinking about turnaround time in hours, not days. Now, 66% of our criminal searches close within an hour and 90% of our searches are closed within 24 hours. That’s fast, real fast – up to four times faster than the average industry turnaround time.
And we didn’t stop there in driving incremental gains. In jurisdictions where there is no option to automate, we have our own court runners. We’re now up to 20 markets. We’ve found that by having our own court runners, records are collected 39% faster than when collected by third-party vendor – the same vendors our competitors use. That’s the benefit of controlling your own channel.
With such dramatic improvements to speed and quality, don’t expect us to rest on our laurels. I believe that excellence is the result of always striving to be better. A belief our clients can count on and will always benefit from.
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