Making your field workforce more efficient and increasing customer loyalty. My talk at Mobile 10
March 10, 2010 by Yuval Brisker
Today I am speaking at the Mobile10 event at Olympia in London about efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Some people would think this is a strange combination… efficiency AND customer service/satisfaction? Most people actually think that these two actually negate each other!
But for TOA this is our bread and butter! Literally! We make our living not just combining the two – but making them work in harmony to both reduce operating costs and enhance the customer experience.
This is because our basic premise is that these two issues are equally and completely intertwined. You cannot have one without the other:
And in TOA’s world it’s focus on the customer experience and making sure that customer commitment is MET and that the customer not only has what he or she needs -but has it when and where you promised to deliver it. This is the only TRUE PATH TO EFFICIENCY.
When we started this TOA our goal was to solve the problem of customers “waiting at home without knowing” when a technician (engineer in UK-speak) would arrive at their door.
That was the original seed of the idea: Why not solve the problem of customers “waiting without knowing” by providing them with real-time up-to-date information about the status of their appointment in a pro-active, personalized, dynamic and interactive way?! Such a simple idea!
But what we found was that underlying that lack of information to the customer – was a lack of accurate information by ALL the stakeholders in the appointment event: dispatchers, managers, technicians/mobile employees, call center customer service reps, etc. No one had an actual, up-to-date, easily accessible, real-time picture of the field.
And that’s what we created with TOA’s web-based SaaS solution: A system that collects analyzes , processes and disseminates real-time, time-based, actionable, predictive, intelligent information of what is happening in the field with a focus on the customer and the customer experience.
This is the first true web-based information hub to aggregate all the relevant information about the appointment or field event So that no one is left out in the dark wondering: What is actually going on? When is that appointment or activity going to happen? Why do I have to wait all day without knowing?
We ended up creating one probably the most sophisticated system focusing on predictive analytics, on time and time-based performance pattern recognition and integrated customer communications. All with the goal of keeping customer commitment! That’s the key!
One of the questions asked was: Who is to blame for keeping you waiting at home or for not arriving on time…is it the field employee (technician, driver, delivery person) or is it the company that is employing him. What was the overwhelming answer?
