Quantrax Corporation today announced successful deployment of their “Right Party Contact console”, something their Director of Operations Debbie Collins described as “exciting technology that will reinvent the collection industry”.
Lighthouse Consulting’s Phillip Duff who has been actively following Quantrax’s technology talked to Debbie about this new technology.
PD – Quantrax has described this new solution as the greatest innovation since the predictive dialer. The predictive dialer has been around for a long time. Why do you say there has been a lack of innovation for so many years?
DC – The industry has made lots of progress in many areas. We’ve gone from automating the card system to some very powerful collection systems. But how many applications have truly leveraged the power of computers to address a major business need in undiscovered ways? Of course, we’ve said that our “intelligent software” was the last great invention. This is the latest!
PD – What major business need did you set out to address?
DC – Quickly obtaining contact with the right party is the most important thing we have to do in collections. Today, everyone uses powerful dialers, but have as many as 6 or 7 potential numbers per account. How does everyone do it? It’s a manual process and it was time to change that.
PD – What did Quantrax do?
DC – We allow the user to separate consumer (home, work and cell phone) and third party numbers. You specify strategy for the order in which those numbers should be attempted. You tell the system how you divide the day into different “time windows”. Instead of working the consumer, you work the phone numbers. Each number will be attempted multiple times, at different times in the day. You will never have one number being attempted only during the morning, or some numbers not being attempted at all.
PD – Don’t agents usually place calls when they want to?
DC – Yes. There must be a change in thinking. After a phone number is presented the agent must not place any follow-up calls. The system should manage every phone call because it can do it better than any human.
PD – What about calling cell phones?
DC – If the next number to be called is a cell, you move the account into a different campaign which could be a preview (managed) campaign. This happens dynamically in real time.
PD – What type of productivity gains are you expecting?
DC – Even no answers waste resources. We eliminate wasted attempts and for the first time, ensure uniform attention to all the potential numbers. Experts who have understood what we have done are optimistic about getting to a right party contact at least 30% faster than they presently do. This will translate to faster collections and potential increases of over 20% in gross collections.
PD – You think this is ground-breaking technology?
DC – Of course! When was the last time technology gave you a 30% gain in the most important area of collection operations, without adding to your costs?