With the addition this week of the new Kindle HTML5 application, which allows amazon kindle users to access their full library of books from every HTML5-enabled browser (online AND offline) – it’s clear that the HTML5 revolution is in full swing. And those in the know are both impressed and supportive.

Being a natively cloud-based SaaS company – TOA is totally there:

On the back of our most fundamental founding principle – NO INSTALLED APP – we have  embraced HTML5 in its totality in order to provide deep enhanced mobility to our customers worldwide. ETAdirect HTML5 Mobility  (Called H5M) is a nothing short of spectacular – with the beautiful look, feel and a robust depth of functionality of a downloaded installed app but totally in the browser. TOA’s engineers have pushed the envelope on what HTML5 can do and provide our customers to the absolute limits…and beyond…Some things we can talk about  (and some we absolutely can’t – being that they are huge innovations and everyone would LOVE to know what they are…). But we can revel in things like signature and document capture, document storage and manipulation which are just a few of the cool capabilities that this next generation markup language affords us and we can extend to our customers.

In TOA Tech’s ETAdirect H5Mobility we are definitely charting new territory, even for HTML5, with a groundbreaking offline persistence capability that will not only allow users to access all the relevant time sensitive information when the user is offline in an area where there is no coverage, but  TOA’s engineers have taken it one huge step beyond just ‘plain’ offline –  they have made the application data available to the user even if the browser and the device crashes!!! The user can reboot, log into ETAdirect and have all his information restored in the ETAdirect browser app to where he was pre-crash – all without having any access to the Internet. Now that is one of the huge feats that makes the ETAdirect H5Mobility app the most powerful and versatile app on the market today.

“Besides perhaps a root canal or a tax audit, few things can be more frustrating than making an appointment to have a cable technician visit your home. You’re given a four-hour window and find yourself waiting and waiting, with no idea when the technician will arrive. Inevitably, it seems, he does not show up until just before the window expires. Or, despite the four-hour time frame, he arrives late.”

- “Cable Contract Has Fines for Late Service”, Fernanda Santos, New York Times, September 14th, 2010

In honor of TOA’s 7th birthday last week – The New York Times reported eloquently that the City of New York (the place where the idea for TOA was actually born) gave its citizens a long needed present by officially recognizing “The Cable Guy Problem” and codifying into law that cable companies have to provide a Time of Arrival (TOA) and then need to arrive on time or face a serious penalty (losing a month’s subscriber fees).

As all those who read this blog know – TOA Technologies, my company, has made it its mission to solve this problem : i.e. the problem of customers stranded at home, frustrated, waiting without knowing when, or even if, the cable technician will arrive. TOA’s advanced technology solution helps our clients manage customer appointments and the technicians in the field serving those customers with one goal in mind – to make sure that customers’ time is respected and customers’ needs and preferences come first. Our patented solution has been adopted by many companies around the country and the world to specifically address the problem  (including some in the NY Tri-State area).

Irad Carmi (my partner) and I recognized years ago that this problem was not ‘just another customer service annoyance’ but rather a greater sociological, economic issue that reflects a deep systemic operational problem that most service providers who run a mobile workforce have ignored. It is ingrained in their legacy systems and processes and based on just plain taking the customer and their time for granted. But it ultimately ends up backfiring and producing a lot of inefficiency along the way.

This problem isn’t trivial because it ends up costing many millions of people, the customers waiting at home, a lot of their precious time, their hard earned money, vacation time, their freedom, etc. It produces aggravation, at the least and, many times, even animosity towards these service providers and their employees. It also actually costs these companies their brand equity,  the goodwill of their customers and a lot of  wasted revenue money lost on missed appointments, unproductive technician time, unnecessary calls to the call center and, most of all,  the ultimate price:  customers leaving them when better service is offered by someone else.

[In fact, TOA just completed its annual Cost of Waiting Survey, which we will publish shortly and which I will be blogging about. This survey examines this very issue and its economic and social effects in three countries (US, UK and Germany), and the results are incredibly interesting, so stay tuned].

TOA has been blessed by many visionary clients who ‘got it’.  They are the trailblazers, the early adopters, who gave us a chance at every point along the way, and who like us, just could not sit around and see their companies waste tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, of dollars AND not provide great service to their customers.

There are always visionaries in every company. But all it takes is one person. One person, I know, can change a culture, a company, the world entire. And we have met many of these. These visionary leaders know that they had to make a change and they were and are willing to fight for that change themselves, against the machinations of their organizations.  They do this because they know that they are right. They know that there is a better way – and using a cross section of  technology and mind to transform the customer appointment experience (using TOA, of course) – and they KNOW:  if it is there, then they have to make a better experience available to their customers. It takes a lot to make change in big companies, but there are always people who do.

We are grateful to them  (and you know who you are…) for standing up to the status quo and for giving us a great opportunity to (in our small way) help make life better for your customers in many places around the country and the world. So it is to these leaders that I am dedicating this post, and about them that I am actually writing the response to the NY Times article AND today’s editorial about this issues (yes, the Times wrote an editorial about this). Because these clients of ours did not need legislation to choose positive change for their companies and their customers.

We have a lot more companies and many more leaders to convince that we have THE solution for them. But with the help of my great team and the help of our fantastic set of current bold visionary clients (who all become evangelists too…) I know that we will.

Oh, and thank you, City of New York!

My co-founder, partner and our CTO, Irad Carmi, has written a great post regarding the power of technology to enable a more complete, humane and trusting relationship between our customers and their employees – and at the same time – increase efficiencies and the bottom line.  Yes… in TOA’s world – humanity and the bottom line can co-exist. Here’s Irad:

One of the interesting changes that happens to our customers once TOA’s system is deployed is the significant evolution in the way they perceive the work ethic of their mobile employees and the impact of that evolution.
Before using TOA and without real time visibility into what’s happening in the field (which most companies don’t have before they use TOA – YB), companies assume their mobile employees are “guilty until proven innocent”. In other words – companies assume that many mobile employees are trying to somehow deceive them: taking longer than reported or needed breaks, finishing jobs early and taking their time to report on that, starting the day later and finishing the day earlier than they actually report, etc..

Because of this sense of management’s ‘not knowing what is really happening out there’, companies have too many supervisors and spend significant resources in an effort to try to find out, retroactively, if their mobile employees were actually “not guilty”. This inverse approach is expensive, inefficient, ineffective, and along the way, doesn’t contribute to good employer-employee relationships.

TOA introduces a paradigm shift:

By providing complete transparency through real-time visibility into all field activities at multiple tiers of the company’s management (dispatchers, supervisors, managers  – all have real time visibility into field operations status via advanced web-based tools), companies can significantly simplify their operational processes, save a lot of money, and improve efficiencies. And mobile employees are considered “innocent” by default.

With TOA’s solution, ETAdirect, it is extremely hard to “cheat”  time, and a supervisor can respond to any perceived abnormalities within minutes. Approval processes are simplified and streamlined, and everyone wins.

What does this mean in practical terms?

A pre-ETAdirect customer may have a manual triple-approval process before a work order is closed and submitted to the billing and customer care system. With ETAdirect the process is reduced to a single automated step – from the mobile device directly to the back-end billing and customer care system. Any errors/omissions are caught by ETAdirect’s front end, back end, or the billing system seamlessly. An error triggers instant escalation, and the supervisor can ensure it is quickly addressed. As a results, instead of having three supervisors check every single work orders, only one supervisor needs to pay attention to 3 out of every 100 work orders.

How does this impact the customers who use our system and this approach?

1. TOA’s customers see significant reduction in number of dispatchers/supervisors needed to actually manage field operations. And those who are managing the field are not doing mindless oversight and auditing of daily work (which helps their morale too).
2. Mobile employees need less time to complete their tasks, so they can do more work than before or spend more time with customers to increase customer satisfaction.

And the bottom line is clear:

One TOA customer has reduced dispatcher count by 60% without any negative impact on operations. Only positive results ensued on all levels.
Another customer of TOA’s is performing the same amount of field work they were doing three years ago, but with 18.5% less technicians.

And employee/employer relations have a new life.

Yesterday I was at The Cable Show in LA mingling with elite of the industry at  receptions where all the CEOs (Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, etc.)of the industry were present.

It was interesting to hear that there was a lot of thinking and talking about the future of the business. Clearly people devoting mind time to how they can stay ahead.

I attended a very interesting conversation with Brian Roberts with Peter Chernin. It was clear he was thinking about the business all the time -(in fact he said that he is constantly thinking that the whole edifice would come down on him – he said “that’s what I have Steve Burke for, he always see the glass half full and I ALWAYS see the glass half empty – I thought that was interesting). He was talking about how Comcast is dedicating a lot of thought on how to improve the customer experience both in terms of content and technology.  He was very proud to show off Comcast’s new interactive guide interface,  which was indeed impressive.  It was clear how much thinking is going on about the customer experience at the level of the customer interaction with the content.

But WE know that the most important interaction is the human connection.

And though Brian Roberts did say that the cable industry is the industry people “love to hate” – he offered clue into how Comcast is intending to transform the customer experience as it relates to the one time that people will actually see a Comcast person face-to-face, i.e  the in-home appointment.

So today I went to check out how things are going at the level of the earth, not the stars – from the pinnacle of glamour and power, to a day spent with a tech – with one of TOA’s customers’ people in the field.

And somehow there were a lot of things that seemed the same to me. He was also thinking about how to make the customer experience better. Crawling in attics and closets… drilling, hooking and thinking how best to do things. But the difference was that he was there on the front lines – in people’s homes, under their carpet and inside their kitchen. It’s amazing how intimate this job is. People let you into the most private parts of their home and life without much reservation, exposing their most intimate physical space. Maybe it’s because, at the end of the day, the cable guy is just another sort of handyman, I don’t know… but it’s a fact that you get to see a LOT when you’re on this job. And it’s a hard job, both physically and mentally, to be the front line of the industry that ‘people love to hate’ as Brian Roberts put it and do a great job – which the guy did!

And if that’s the case, and you have great people doing a tough job, working one by one to transform the image of customer service – it behooves the leaders to provide them the best tools and the best methodologies to help them do their job with the least annoyance and disruption – to search and find the most innovative technology – software and hardware – to take away the burdens of the job and let them focus on what they do best and need to do best. Interacting with the customer well. It will pay dividends more than any great menu driven interactive guide – as well thought as it might be.