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Gamestec, the largest gaming and amusement machine operator in the UK, provides services for over 35,000 machines in 10,500 locations. With many decades’ of experience, the company prides itself on the level of service it offers its customers which include pubs, leisure venues, clubs, bars and service stations. They provide an end to end solution for the operation of the gaming system with 364 days per year customer care facility and over 1000 field based teams to ensure local experts are on hand.

Managing field workers and field service

As part of their commitment to customer care, Gamestec embarked on a project to replace their legacy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and improve customer service levels. Having evaluated many CRM options they chose to work with mplsystems to introduce a pioneering solution, utilising mplsystems’ iMobile technology that would not only provide a CRM solution but would also offer call and email handling, manage bookings and engineering visits and provide visibility of, and communications with, field workers.

The solution

Working with mplsystems, Gamestec devised a solution that was unique in that it collapses the service desk, planning and dispatch functions into a single ‘intelligent’ agent desktop, thereby enabling the contact centre to communicate directly with engineers’ smart phones. The desktop integrates Gamestec’s asset management; ordering and stock control systems and provides a mobile workforce management tool. iMobile smart phone app allows the company’s in-house contact centre to communicate directly with engineers’ PDAs, automatically allocating jobs according to the engineers’ skill, location and current workload. Should emergency appointments come up or clients change their bookings, schedules are dynamically optimised based on field engineers’ current locations and loading and real time updates sent to the appropriate engineer.

Agent Experience

The custom agent desktop is designed to provide a single view of everything that the agent needs to resolve Gamestec client requests. It provides the agent with a complete view of the client’s service history, specific assets, locations as well as managing service bookings and schedules. This integrated approach has allowed Gamestec to change the way customer service is managed; previously, all service requests were passed through a number of separate departments, opening up the opportunity for errors and delays. The new desktop solution brings these teams into a cross-functional role covering help desk, customer service and planning. Now, requests are dealt with by one person who dispatches the request immediately out to the field. This real time view, along with other process improvements, has enabled service response times to decrease by 28%, or 44 minutes over the 12 months.

Customer Experience

Providing real time customer updates: when a customer calls to check the progress of, or change to, a service request, the agent can provide an immediate update from a live map on their desktop showing in real time all engineers’ locations (via GPS), their skill sets and current loading.

End-to-end service request reporting improves customer satisfaction: management is provided with real time monitoring of service requests, escalations and SLA adherence. Using hour by hour and day by day reports, aged issues can be captured quickly, escalation effectively managed and communicated to both field staff and customers advising them of completion timescales.

Business benefits

Prior to the iMobile deployment, Gamestec had needed separate contact centre technology, CRM and handheld devices to maintain communications with engineers. These systems required multiple licenses and were expensive to maintain and support and were proving to be inflexible. By deploying the new solution to cover all 3 functional areas, Gamestec has experienced an 88% reduction in on-going IT costs and has enabled increased efficiency across the organisation in how service and field workers are deployed.

Coastway is the largest chartered land surveying and geospatial engineering company in Ireland. Headquartered in Naas, Ireland with overseas offices in London and Poland, Coastway specialises in capturing, processing and managing geospatial data.

Terrestrially based technologies make the land surveying of quarries and similar large, external facilities time-intensive.  As this time passes there is the risk of the survey becoming inaccurate as the land changes and the quarry alters or further equipment is added.

This necessitates the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to enable quicker, more comprehensive topographical surveys.  UAVs also enable safer working practices and typically have less impact on the environment.

To ensure an accurate survey, control of the UAV is paramount.  A tablet PC is the natural choice.  However, using the tablet specified by the UAV manufacturers, Coastway soon hit a series of challenges: a short battery life, lack of ruggedisation, excessive weight and limited functionality interrupted work flow.   As a result, Coastway turned to rugged tablet specialist Camtech to specify and implement a better solution.

Darrell Newman, Technical Services Manager, Camtech explains: “The typical work flow for the Coastway team would be to use a tablet in the office to conduct pre-flight checks, then file a flight plan.  The device would then need to remain on standby as the team travels to the site, in order to enable any revisions to the scope of the task or the flight plans.

“The survey team will usually handle around three jobs per day, with around four flights per job of approximately 20 minutes per flight.  This profile of activity and the environment in which the teams operate made battery life, portability and ruggedisation critical concerns.  As a result we specified the Motion CL910 with additional peripherals to enhance the weather proofing.”

The CL910 enables the team to have a full working day with up to seven hours of battery life.  At 1.9kg the CL910 is portable and in the field, the 10.1” screen delivers bright visibility and the ruggedisation of Corning® Gorilla® Glass.  The display supports both "Touch" and "Pen" input, enabling fine control of the UAV drone.  When the survey is complete, the integrated Wi-Fi enables quick transmission of the data.  Specific job data and individual flight footage are kept separate by backing up flight footage to the SD card in the internal bay.

Motion CL910 Tablet Overview: