RER: What are some of the products and capabilities you have added in the past year approximately?
Park: Over the last year, our team has focused on expanding the Texada experience to offer practical use of our platform for everyone involved with a rental operation, including the customers. Our Customer Access portal enables customers to conduct business with a rental company directly from a company’s website; paying outstanding invoices, managing open contracts, or check the rate calendar. For service coordinators and dispatchers, we deployed major updates including drag and drop scheduling for work assignment while also including an updated map view for monitoring drivers throughout the day. We are continuously working with our customers to develop features that supercharge rental productivity and look forward to doing so throughout 2020.
What are customers asking you for now, or what are some of the trends in what they’re asking for?
For Texada users, the trend towards adopting mobile workflows spiked in 2020. Although the pandemic proved challenging for many in the rental industry, there was a resounding interest from our user base to begin testing and implementing mobile technology into their service departments. With new eyeballs pointing towards our mobile app each day, we are able to collect more user feedback and recommendations for future enhancements.
We found that even companies that had experienced layoffs were able to take advantage of the unforeseeable slowdown by testing free tools that Texada had made available. Overall, 2020 has created a unique opportunity for businesses to take the time to prepare and test the products in anticipation of successfully rolling out new technology projects for their teams and their customers.
What are some the capabilities of your software that are under-utilized that you wish more companies would pick up on?
The number one hidden value within the Texada platform is our payment process integration Texada Pay. We first introduced Texada Pay in 2019 as a way to help our customers collect credit card payments at the counter and since then it has spread throughout the application, improving the payment touchpoints across all of our applications. Now, our customers are able to collect credit card payments within Texada at the counter, online with our Customer Access website extension, or during their monthly billing cycle by charging customer cards that are securely stored and kept on file.
In terms of the pandemic, presumably visits to your software users have decreased? Have you improved or enhanced your online training capabilities?
Heading into the pandemic, we knew we had large in-person training sessions scheduled for customers that would now need to be handled completely remotely. Our team was accustomed to doing individual or small group training sessions for customers, but training classes of 80+ users at a time was a new challenge. In order to enhance our ability to effectively train all our attendees, our training process evolved to include moderators that answered individual questions in the chat and supported those that may be struggling during the session without holding up the entire group. After completing a handful of these sessions, we are confident that this will become a more standard and impactful way of training users.
