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.
The BlueService implementation has made Konica Minolta's deployment team more efficient, Ross says. "The ability to get information to the techs and specialists in the field immediately has been a huge improvement, as well as the ability for each person to log onto the system and see their individual schedules."
In addition to medical equipment providers, BlueFolder's customers include a range of manufacturers and service providers, computer and IT service companies, and industrial equipment installers. Fey says he has found that scheduling management is a "big problem" for all of his company's subscribers, and the issue boils down to proper utilization of their workforces. "The ultimate goal is being able to deliver a high level of service to their customers and then be able to bill them accurately," he says.
Some of BlueFolder's subscribers had tried previously to use some combination of Outlook, Excel, whiteboards, and other collaborative tools to manage their customer data, Fey says, but certain "pieces of the puzzle always were missing." These puzzle pieces might include service contract history, billing records, and problems the customer may have had over time. For example, a customer's service history records and its annual maintenance agreements might be located in two separate files or applications, making it difficult — or impossible — to view them together, Fey says.
Not Just Another CRM
Service quality management may appear to be similar to a traditional customer relationship management (CRM) application, but there is a key difference, Fey says. Whereas many CRM functions focus mainly on selling a product or service, service quality management addresses the product's delivery and post-sale performance.
The term "CRM" often doesn't accurately describe what most of these applications are known for, according to Brett Schklar, marketing manager at BlueFolder. "CRM is somewhat of a misnomer, since it's really a sales-enablement tool," he says. BlueService, he adds, is closer to a true customer management tool in the sense that it is used to track data after the sale is made — in other words, after a prospect becomes a customer.
The BlueService system fosters internal collaboration by providing current information to all of the individuals who need it, with real-time status updates on projects and technicians' whereabouts. And because BlueService is a hosted service, people in the field can access it via the Internet.
"Since BlueService is delivered as SaaS [software as a service], smaller organizations, like regional offices within a large company, can manage service providers through a centralized, on-demand call center with one interface for all their clients," Wettemann of Nucleus Research says. "Service managers have complete access to technicians' free and busy time, and are better equipped to let customers know what to expect when they schedule service."
While other software vendors share the service management space, BlueFolder's fiercest competitor is the status quo, Fey says. Most of his company's customers are small or mid-size businesses that either try to build a service management application in-house or don't make any change at all to their paper-based systems. The Web-based, monthly priced BlueService is well-suited to small businesses that otherwise might not be able to afford the license and maintenance investment of an on-premises application, he says.
In a competitive environment where even the smallest businesses have customers that won't tolerate substandard service, vendors — regardless of their size — have to rethink any outmoded processes in their service departments that don't measure up to the investment they have made in their products.