In a recent internal planning session for a newsletter to prospective clients, some of Quantrax’s management team discussed the groundbreaking developments that have made the last year one of the most productive for Quantrax. In this article, Delight Kasserman, an application specialist at Quantrax, shared some of the questions she reviewed with chief technologist Ranjan Dharmaraja, as they discussed recent accomplishments.
DK – Why are you excited about our accomplishments in the last 12 months?
RD – This has been a horrible period for all collection software developers. Few clients have invested, waiting for things to improve. Quantrax has created and deployed some significant technology, while other companies talk about major changes to come or struggle with deploying their new products.
DK – Mobile may be the big shift in consumer communications. What have we worked on recently?
RD – One of the very exciting things we have is a responsive mobile payment app, where a consumer can be securely authenticated, see their balance, set up a check or credit card payment and verify key information in a few minutes, on a PC, a tablet or a smart phone. And yes, it is very secure.
DK – With quality issues and rising costs, how have we made it easier for agents to work?
RD – We have spent over 3 years on “modernizing” our application. We know what has happened to some major vendors who have tried to rewrite their products. We have made major changes to our design around every 5 years. One of those projects has been modernization, with state-of-the-art user interfaces. Our recent updates provide optimized web access for Chrome. Agents work an account by pointing and clicking on the events that took place during the consumer interaction!
DK – Everyone claims to have a great user interface. What’s different about Quantrax?
RD – Many products have very old interfaces that were designed before the great transformation of user interfaces that has taken place in the last few years. Some are simply screen savers. Our senior developer AA has described our superior look and feel to me as follows “It’s an OS thing. Today we have technologies like WPF (Windows presentation foundation), CSS3 for styling, jQuery, jQuery animations, YUI framework (Yahoo UI), ASP.NET and HTML5. We use or plan to consider all of these in our modern products”.
DK – What other areas set us apart from the competition?
RD – I have always said that there are two types of products in collections – Smart technology and the other technology! The fact that no one other than Quantrax claims to have “an expert system” (software that can be trained to think and make decisions like a collection expert),always sets us apart from any competitor. We continue to invent groundbreaking features. As an example, we have a new right-party contact console that will manage different types of phone numbers (home, work, cell and third parties) and manage the attempts so that every number is called the same number of times, and each attempt is always made at a different time in the day! All this happens without a supervisor having to make any decisions or do any manual account management.
DK – I’ve been in collections for many years. That sounds so basic, but we could never do this! What results have our clients seen?
RD – Yes, talking to the right party quickly is the most important thing in collections! It has not been automated, because it is difficult! Our clients are suddenly talking to people they could not reach for months. Some numbers had been attempted over 20 times, but never in the afternoon. They can confidently give up on an account or try something else relatively quickly, because they know the account has been worked correctly! And yes, they are talking to more right parties and collecting more with the same people!
DK – Back to the intelligent software comment. Our competitors say they can do what Quantrax does. True?
RD – True. Travel agents could try to do what Expedia can do for you today. Does anybody use a travel agent today? Expedia is intelligent. RMEx (our product) is also intelligent! It’s not about what our competitors can do. It’s about how difficult it is for them and their clients do what we can do.
DK – And the topic we are tired of hearing about – compliance. Is Quantrax different?
RD – Of course! Everyone is talking about the problem, including software vendors. Where are the solutions? I have been to many conferences and am not seeing the details of solutions to areas like call and message frequency management, at the client, state and city level. This is quite difficult, because you need very modern software design, new databases and tightly integrated dialer technology to track and count every phone call and phone type. For example, how many systems can systemically enforce the home before work rule? We do all this now, with no custom code.
DK – And much of this has been done in the last year?
RD – In the last 2 – 3 years, we were either going to wait and do very little while the industry got stronger, or we had to find something important and interesting to do! We decided to double our investments in technology development. Many major collection and legal collection software vendors are going after new markets or planning new products that could take years. We find ourselves at a distinct advantage with modern, powerful and tested software that works!
ABOUT QUANTRAX – Quantrax is a high-end software developer for receivables management and collections. They have been in business for over 25 years and have clients in over 35 states and in Canada. For more information contact them at 301.657-2084, or visit them at www.quantrax.com