‘How do I change/switch my client’s credit monitoring service?’, ‘My customer/client wants to change credit monitoring.’, and similar inquiries are very common within our community of Credit Heroes. In this article, we’ll explain everything you need to know about changing report providers for a client.
Table of contents:
To start, make sure you have the following:
Scenario:
Has this happened to you? You import a credit report for a client, and then a month or so later the client wants to use a different type of free credit report. You try to import and it's blocked for change? Yes, this will happen and it's for an important reason. But don't worry, there is a logical explanation/solution.
Is it possible to change report/monitoring providers for clients?
Unfortunately no.
When you import a credit report for a client, that's when you choose (and save) the credit report provider. Once you've imported the report for a given client, it's not possible to change report providers for that same client.
What’s the reason behind this limitation?
Each report provider writes the information a bit differently, so importing from multiple providers for the same client would create a mess of duplicate records. For that reason, changing providers (after you've already imported for a client) is disabled for everyone.
Your clients must forward response letters to you
Yes, our software can import twice from the same provider and it will update changes. However, it won't give you the important information that is on the response letter from the credit bureau or creditor.
You cannot do credit repair without seeing the responses to the dispute letters. It's critical to ask your client to forward "all correspondence" to you. The client must participate in the process, otherwise, credit repair is not quite possible.
Alternatives to changing report providers
If you've read all this and you still want to import twice for the same client, here are some solutions:
Import from the same provider you used before. Then changes will update (but remember, you will need the important information in the dispute response letter from the bureau/creditor).
If you're just wanting to update credit items and you have the response letter(s), click here for an alternative way to update credit item changes.
If there's some unusual reason why you need to start things over for a client with a different credit monitoring provider, you can delete their client profile and add a new one.
What you can do now: