Editorial from the June 2007 issue of Managing Automation

Keeping Your Customers Waiting?

by Diane Himes, MA Editorial Staff

Posted on Monday, November 19, 2007 10:46:46 AM                                     

Almost everyone knows what waiting for the cable guy is like.

You call for service, and the cable company assigns you a date and a window of time spanning several hours when you can expect a technician to come to your home. You clear your schedule to be on hand on the appointed day. The day arrives and you wait — and wait. Sometimes the technician doesn't show. After the designated time frame has elapsed, you put in another call to the company, and the person who answers your call sounds clueless. The process then starts over again. While you may have gotten a good deal for the cable itself, when it comes to repairs or maintenance, sub-par service seems to be a necessary — or at least widely accepted — evil.

In the business-to-business sector, however, some vendors are striving to give customers high-quality service after the sale. Unlike in the consumer cable market, rival vendors may be waiting to secure the business of frustrated customers, so such initiatives become even more imperative.

Service delivery problems originate within the vendor's operation, of course. But why is there sometimes a disparity between a great product and the quality of its maintenance program? After a customer has invested in a product, the vendor's reputation is at the mercy of the service department, says Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Nucleus Research, a firm that tracks ROI on technology investments. "This is an important issue when it comes to customer retention."

What's the Solution?

Service management software can help companies mitigate customer dissatisfaction by helping to set appropriate expectations and manage the service workforce efficiently, Wettemann says.

One such product is BlueService, a Web-based service team management program from BlueFolder Inc. Imaging equipment provider Konica Minolta Medical Imaging USA uses BlueService in its field service, applications, and preventative maintenance departments to handle functions such as service requests, scheduling, customer records, and project tracking.

"Faced with factors like high employee turnover and myriad sources of data, service managers need a sophisticated system that will pull together all the pieces while being customizable and easy to use," Wettemann explains. "With BlueService, field sales managers can log onto the Internet and track everybody's whereabouts."

Konica Minolta provides sophisticated imaging equipment, including computed radiography systems, laser imagers, and film processors, to hospitals, clinics, doctors' offices, and animal hospitals. The company has more than 100 users — engineers, technicians, and managers — on the BlueService application. They are located across the country and concerned mostly with post-sale equipment implementation functions.

"Konica provides complicated equipment," says Marc Fey, chief operating officer at BlueFolder. First, that equipment must be delivered to a customer's premises, along with a hardware engineer for the initial installation. Then, an applications person visits the site for quality assurance tests. "This process of fulfilling the sale — of delivery and implementation — takes about a week," he says.

The problem for Konica Minolta was primarily on the scheduling side. Konica Minolta had "80 people running around trying to figure out who was supposed to be where, on what day, and at what time," Fey says. Also, pertinent customer information was not always visible to everyone involved.

Prior to Konica Minolta's use of BlueService, which began around April 2006, its service and maintenance departments relied on various Excel spreadsheets to manage and track technician schedules and customer information. The company sought to improve its service scheduling process and to quickly realize results from the change, says Charles Ross, deployment/installation manager in Konica Minolta's service department.

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