“Innocent Until Proven Guilty” – Guest post by Irad Carmi, TOA’s CTO

September 12, 2010 by Irad Carmi

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.

From One Side to Another

May 12, 2010 by Yuval Brisker

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.

Letting things grow at their own pace

October 31, 2009 by Yuval Brisker

Its always interesting to read Fred Wilson. A VC who seems to forever have a fresh take on his business, on the world around him, never losing the sense of wonder and at the same time looking at things critically.

I have been reading his blog for over 6 years….pretty much when he started writing it, and when I set off  on this phase of my professional life.  His words, thoughts, ideas, experiences have been a beacon of thoughtfulness, education and enlightenment in the process of building this business. His diligence over the years,  his total dedication and discipline in sitting almost EVERY single day and writing something interesting, actually made a difference in my life. Whether he’s written about the business, technology, family life, his family’s travel, food, politics and music – his sharing this his “Living in Public”, as he calls it, (citing a film he invested in about blogging and social networking) has definitely enriched my life and my thinking in ways that it’s impossible to account for.

This steadfastness is admirable and I am bringing up his blog and its affect on me because he most always seems to write something that resonates, that provokes me to think.  Today he wrote about something that as entrepreneurs we think about a lot. The exit. But he wrote about it, as usual, in a fresh way.

He called it Slow Capital, because it’s about recognizing that businesses like people, are very different from each other. Some burst onto the scene and make a point and are sold in a year; some take years to incubate and become ‘who they are’. Knowing which to push and which to cultivate over time seems to be part of the art of investing wisely. And indeed Fred writes this post as an homage of sorts to Warren Buffet and actually mentions him. Believing in taking time to build a business and in the potential of time to enrich it is the core notion of what Irad and I are doing here. Thanks Fred, you have a place of honor in the blog roll on the right here…Number 1.