July/Aug 2004

Office equipment servicing company Ikon has reduced call centre traffic by nearly 40 per cent since it switched to a Dexterra mobile data and voice application

When you have 40,000 customers in the UK depending on you if their office equipment breaks down, you need not only a large number of field service staff to look after them, but also an efficient customer service management operation.

Ikon specialises in servicing all types of office equipment including photocopiers, printers and IT servers. In the UK it employs over 2,000 people, including 600 field service technicians. Fault reporting accounts for the majority of calls that come into the customer service centre, and call centre staff have to allocate over 2,500 service visits every day to the technicians.

Ikon's reputation depends on customer service and it relies on its in-house call management system, Sidon, to deliver this. Sidon handles customer requests for on-site maintenance, notifies technicians of impending jobs and updates customer service records.

 

Until March this year, Ikon technicians carried both a pager and a mobile phone. The pager was used to despatch the next job from the call centre. The technicians used the mobile phones to let the call centre know which job they were going to attend to. When a job was completed, they also had to telephone the centre staff with full details of the service performed and the fault found, so that customer records would be up-to-date if there was a query.

Voice traffic between the technicians and the call centre was especially high - partly because Ikon's policy is to allow its mobile workers to prioritise their own work order within the constraints of customer SLAs. "But technicians were complaining about wasting time zig-zagging across their territories from one customer to the next," explains national service director Marco Pezzani.

"With the high number of service calls to manage every day, there was not enough time for call centre staff to do anything more sophisticated than job allocation. In any case, the staff don't have detailed knowledge about geographical areas, local traffic conditions or the customers."

Any mobile data solution had to retain this ability for technicians to organise their own work schedules, says Pezzani. "We were planning a big culture change from paper-based systems to electronic, and it was important that handheld computers should give technicians access to the same information as before."

Early this year, Ikon began deploying a mobile workforce management system based on Dexterra's Mobility platform and server, plus PDA-style computers. It decided on PDA devices because they could combine voice and data calls in a single unit; were more portable than laptops; and were relatively inexpensive. "Experience will show whether we need more ruggedised devices in the long-term, but user-appeal has a lot to do with acceptance in a project like this, and PDAs definitely have that."

Although Ikon is planning to upgrade its legacy back-office system to an Oracle platform early in 2005, it did not want to wait until then before upgrading its mobile workforce management system. Fortunately, Dexterra's server platform connects to SQL, SAP, Siebel, and Oracle systems and is modular, so it can be adapted as business needs grow or change.

Dexterra's Mobility application allows data on parts, product, customer information and troubleshooting options to be held locally on the handheld terminals. Technical white papers are also stored locally, allowing the technician to work through complex problems on site and solve them during the first visit, eliminating the need to call back to headquarters for answers or for a second visit.

It is now the technicians' responsibility to decide job order in terms of urgency and to ensure Ikon meets customer service-level agreements. They can enter revised ETAs if, for example, they are delayed in traffic or on their current job.

Technicians can also customise the devices to some extent to suit their own particular needs. Some, for instance, download local maps to help them locate customer premises. Others working in more rural locations have asked Ikon to incorporate GPS in future.

In the old days, in addition to contacting the call centre when each job was completed, the technician had to complete a paper record for each job, including parts used, description of the fix, meter readings and a customer signature. He gave one copy to the customer, sent another to the Ikon office and retained one for himself.

Now, customers sign directly on the PDA to acknowledge job completion. As soon as the engineer completes the service visit, customers receive electronic confirmation with details (this comes directly from the engineer via an email). Marco Pezzania says elimination of paperwork has enabled accounts staff to monitor billable service calls closely, and there has been a dramatic drop in invoice disputes.

Another noticeable efficiency gain has come in parts ordering. Technicians carry a stock of parts on vans, but can now also order directly on the PDA. The average part order now takes only seconds instead of five minutes. Ikon has calculated that its field technicians are now saving 15,700 minutes a day on parts ordering and checking. That adds up to over £40,000 per year in mobile voice and data carrier costs alone.