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Paul Saunders of Kirona explains why just “making do” is a dangerous approach when it comes to your field service management systems...

The majority of field service organisations have a mobile solution which meets their needs to varying degrees, however for a large proportion of these organisations, the solution was implemented for a specific contract and then rolled out to other contracts where it’s not a perfect fit or was implemented several years ago, met 100% of the “then” requirements of the organisation but has failed to keep up with the changing requirements of the organisation, their customers or even technology.

This leaves many “making do” with a mobile solution that is expensive to maintain, hard to adapt and less responsive when it comes to providing a competitive advantage above their competitors, mobilising new contracts or delivering additional value on existing contracts.

The contract won and the service delivered by a field service organisation three years ago is typically different to a contract to deliver a similar service today, with clients requiring a different level of service, more efficiencies, more flexibly, all with great visibility.

This means organisations require a more flexible, enterprise class mobile solution that can “adapt” to meet the various needs of the field service organisation and contracts that it provides.

 

Today as a minimum, a field service mobile solution should be capable of integrating with multiple back office solutions, as the majority of field service delivery organisations either end up having multiple back office works management solutions (as they acquire businesses or contracts) or have other systems such as HR, finance, etc.

A modern field service organisation needs a mobile solution that is independent of its FM back office capable of delivering a mobile job that varies from contract to contract, meeting the specific requirements of that contract. Therefore the mobile solution needs to be configurable allowing a single PPM or reactive job type to be modified to be specific to the contract that it’s deployed for.

As an example an organisation might have a standard PPM or reactive job type, with standard fields and workflow deployed to the mobile device, however when a job for contract ‘A’ is received by the mobile solution, additional workflows and data collection might be added automatically to meet the requirements of that contract prior to it being dispatched to the mobile device. This might be contract specific surveys, health and safety checks or intelligence gathering that might deliver additional benefit to the FS organisation or their customer.

Where does this additional data collected get held?

Typically the FS back office solutions are not flexible enough to enable this additional contract specific data storage therefore the mobile solutions server component needs to be capable of storing and making this information available either through integration or reporting.

As many field service back office solutions cannot handle the complex process workflows required by a modern field service organisation this is also something that is often required by the solution that is actually “doing the work”, i.e. the mobile solution.

The ability to implement workflows before and after a task has been dispatched to the field is another key component. If a new reactive job is created where specific niche skills or high value equipment is required, put this into an authorisation process prior to dispatching to the mobile device. Equally if an operative has a specific outcome on a job, the mobile workflow solution should be able to automatically create one or more follow on tasks, place the job in approval, etc.

 

Organisations would need to have developers who develop and tweak their existing solution to meet the needs of them or their customer, or they get their suppliers to do this. They should have a mobile solution capable of being configured and tested in minutes/hours, not days or weeks to meet their exacting requirements.

Kirona’s Job Manager Suite including Job Manager Mobile is a two part solution, JM Mobile and Control Centre. JM Control Centre is capable of being integrated with multiple back office solutions. Within JM Control Centre, users can configure what a standard job type is (such as PPM or Reactive) as well as what additional contract specific workflow or data requirements are required for each instance of this job on a mobile device all without the need for supplier or an organisations development team.

JM Control Centre and JM Mobile can also allow complex contact specific workflows to be implemented, ensuring compliance to the field service organisations standards and processes as well as their customers. This workflow also removes the need for back office intervention for follow-on’s jobs, special tasks, approvals, etc. reducing the resource requirements of organisations.

All of the above gives field service organisations and their customer’s greater flexibility whilst gaining in-house control of their job workflow, something most organisations have never had, enabling them and their customers to be proactive as well as reactive, collect more information for their customer and their customers sites and gain a competitive advantage to enable execute contracts more effectively and to win more business.

 

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Laraine Geddes from Kirona, experts in dynamic resource scheduling, mobile and field service technology contributes an exclusive guide to successfully managing your organisation’s field based workforce...

1. Eradicate paper based systems

Expecting field workers to use paper based records is fraught with potential disaster and inefficiency. Paper based systems often required duplication of work, with data having to be re-entered into back office systems.

KIRONA’S TIPS:

• Deploy mobile applications in the field so that employees only have to record information once while in the field. This improves accuracy of data and frees up more time to carry out more jobs per day. Mobile communication can also reduce inefficient back office administration tasks, or be used to record the information needed for audits.
• Use a workflow driven series of checklists and fields on the mobile device to make sure individual workers follow a standard process. This will ensure continuity of good practice across a region.
• Mobile devices are far more secure than paper. If they are lost data can be locked down through encryption, or Mobile Device Management systems.

2. Dynamic scheduling

Efficiently appointing who visits which site is simplified using dynamic scheduling rather than manual scheduling. Staff availability vs skills vs customer/site availability is difficult enough to balance, add to that factors like service levels, job location, cancellations, even traffic on the road and efficient scheduling is almost impossible.

KIRONA’S TIPS:

• Deploy dynamic scheduling software that can, in real-time, optimise the utilisation of workers in the field - the right person goes to the right location at the right time. This way they spend more time on site and less time waiting for the next job or, for instance, driving unnecessarily long distances to the next job
• Scheduling software can be tuned to deploy personnel based upon pre-set ‘rules’. Work with your technology vendor to utilise this feature so that services can be optimised; like prioritising workers that have visited the site or customer before, or restricting distances to be travelled by employees, or scheduling according to customer needs.
• Consider that most mobile working visits will usually need a follow up visit or another appointment made with a different worker – your scheduling software can allocate new appointments and visits – there and then3. Integrate Systems

Busy staff are often overwhelmed with the amount of departments or agencies they have to collaborate with and the number of systems that they have to provide information to.

By failing to integrate these systems, workers spend many more hours than need be, rekeying data into multiple back-office systems – duplicating effort and creating the potential for mistakes and errors.

KIRONA’S TIPS:

• Choose a mobile solution that can integrate and ‘communicate’ with any system. If implemented correctly this will mean that staff will only need to enter information into their mobile devices once, whereby the data then populates all relevant back-office systems automatically.
• Integrating mobile applications with scheduling systems is particularly powerful. The mobile software can updates the schedule with the emerging day information; allowing visits to be automatically redistributed between staff where visits over-run, customers are unavailable, appointments are cancelled etc.

4. Visibility of front line services

By failing to have visibility of operations in the field, organisations fail to respond to challenges as they happen and lose the opportunity to resolve them at minimum cost and disruption to the customer.

KIRONA’S TIPS:

• Providing mobile devices enables you to track all the factors which impact field performance like: routing of employees, time spent onsite, incomplete jobs, missed appointments, lateness etc. This data can be used to analyse operations, fine tune the scheduling engine or to demonstrate ongoing improvements in efficiency.

5.Having customer information to hand

Arriving at the customer’s location without complete historical notes puts the service provider at a disadvantage when providing its services and is disappointing for customers who expect their service provider to have comprehensive knowledge of their relationship.

KIRONA’S TIPS:

• By using mobile technology the appropriate notes can be delivered to the workers’ mobile devices when they are needed. This means a professional can provide a service with the continuity the customer would expect. It also reduces the risk of them not being able to deliver that service on their first visit.
• Organisations can allow historical records to be sent to field workers for that customer, allowing them to see full details of historic work completed with any certificates, photos, contracts that are relevant. They can also see future planned work future work. This minimises the risk of duplicating work that has already been done or will be done during the course of a contract.

 

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Laraine Geddes, Marketing Manager, Kirona explains how dynamic resource scheduling & mobile working can help you keep promises to customers...

Driving efficiencies in your organisation and ensuring the highest level of customer satisfaction do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Regardless of whether you are managing planned maintenance, reactive field based tasks or complex projects, efficiency comes from doing the right things, at the right time with the most appropriate resources. For the customer, what they want is exactly the same, for you to keep your promises, to perform and complete the task required when you say you will.

Kirona have outlined four ways in which organisations can deliver their promises to customers.

Setting expectations:

It is a careful balance to ensure that customer preferences for appointments are taken into account while also optimising resource utilisation and minimising travel time of operatives. When procuring dynamic resource scheduling software ensure it provides available appointment slots to be offered to customers, whilst highlighting the most efficient slots for the organisation in terms of resource utilisation and travel time.

Setting the right expectation & keeping promises can achieve Customer Satisfaction of 95% or higher.

Communicating with your customer:

One of the primary reasons for appointments being missed is no access to the property, often caused by the customer not being at home.

Kirona’s Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) makes it easy to keep customers informed. Each appointment can be confirmed by email or SMS, with reminders being sent at time intervals such as 24 or 48 hours before the job is due. When an operative updates the job on their mobile device to say that they are en-route to the property, an SMS can be sent to remind the customer.

There will always be exceptions that occur.

Whether it is an unavoidable overrun of a previous job or delays caused by traffic, it is essential that the customer is kept informed. Through the seamless and real-time integration of DRS and Kirona’s Job Manager mobile workforce application, such delays can be proactively managed with a communication sent to the customer informing them that their operative has been delayed and resetting expectations of when they will arrive. Not only does this approach reduce the negative impact on customers, it can also reduce calls from customers to your contact centre chasing progress.

 

North Lanarkshire Council’s no access rate dropped from 40% to just 3% through use of Kirona’s DRS and Job Manager.

Dealing with the emerging day:

No two days can be the same and it is common for events in the day, including emergency work, to require changes to the schedule. The challenge is to cater for overrunning work or new work items while keeping customer promises and also ensuring that you continue to operate in the most optimum way.

By utilising Kirona’s Job Manager as your mobile working solution integrated into Dynamic Resource Scheduling, you gain full visibility of the work being performed in the field. You can see in real-time potential delays and the impact that this will have on your intra-day schedule Rather than having to hold back emergency slots in your schedule or allocating emergency work on a first availability basis, DRS enables you to take a more efficient approach. As changes in the day occur, DRS re-evaluates the day’s plan, adjusting work allocation to take into account the emerging work or availability to ensure you maintain the most optimum work schedule across all available operatives.

Delivering a first time fix:

Not all jobs run to plan. A job can simply take longer than expected. The efficient way to deal with this is to provide the operative with the time they need to complete the task. This avoids an additional appointment being required and ensures that your original promise to the customer is kept.

Step one to increasing the rate of first time fix is ensuring that for each job you have the right operative, resources and time allocated. Key to this is an effective triage process that ensures you can define the key parameters used for scheduling work. Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) enables you to define different categories of skills and qualification of each operative and to align this to job requirements ensuring you always send the right operative.

 

When complications or work variations arise, the seamless integration of Job Manager (JM) and Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS), enables for this to be immediately notified to planners. With full visibility across all operatives of the day’s work and its progression, they are able to quickly sanction job variations and realign work items to ensure other customer commitments are met.

The public sector needs to take a long overdue look at the benefits of field service technology is delivering in the private sector writes Laraine Geddes, Marketing Manager, Kirona...

Kirona When thinking about field service, typically private sector examples spring to mind, such as electricians, plumbers, or other types of contractors performing work in our home or place of business.

We typically don’t think of field workers being associated with government, yet this is a vital component of public service.

Organisations, whether public or private, are leveraging field service technology to improve their customer experience by making the journey less about how they interact with customers and more about the relevancy and context of why customers need to communicate with them.

The objectives of field service work in the private sector are the same as the objectives of public sector field service. Ever present is the need to reduce wastage while at the same time improve real-time visibility and communication between the field based employees and their headquarters, and field based employees and their customers.

It’s imperative for field service technology to allow real-time communication; otherwise important decisions could be made based on older, non-relevant information. At the same time, customers need to be kept informed throughout the lifecycle of a field service interaction.

Kirona have enabled public sector organisations such as North Lanarkshire Council save in excess of £1.5m since implementing Kirona’s field service automation solutions across its Housing Property Services and Home Support Services. Together with the impressive cost savings the council has improved the service for patients receiving care at home vie the Home Support Team, as well as their social housing tenants.

Another example of field service technology enabling impressive savings is South Gloucestershire Council. The council serves a community with a population of approximately 270,000 in the South West of England.

As with many public sector organisations in recent years, the local authority has faced the significant challenge of maintaining service levels whilst undergoing spending cuts.

Seeking to make cost efficiencies the council implemented Kirona’s Job Manager mobile worker solution to 90 of its Street Care team. Job Manager enables the council to reduce paperwork, reduce drive time and phone calls, and automate job allocation and increase real-time job visibility.

The council has reduced Street Care costs by £500k per year and response time now averages 3 days compared to 7 day prior to implementing Kirona’s software.

 

Now, compare these outcomes to those of Carpetright, the leading flooring retailer.

Carpetright introduced dynamic scheduling and field service automation to its team of 320 Home Estimators.

Service improved with customers being able to book convenient appointment slots, estimators travel time reduced to reach customer appointments and estimated sales increased by 34%.

These examples show how field service software solutions in both the private and the public sector are being used to increase productivity, reduce costs, and significantly improve customer satisfaction.

However according to techUK adoption of field service technology for public services is being held back due to lack of skills despite civil servants agreeing technology is critical.

“Technology has a key role in helping the government deliver more for less and it’s great to see such widespread acknowledgement of the benefits technology has to offer,” said Julian David, CEO of techUK.

With the creation of the Crown Commercial Service G-Cloud Digital Marketplace, adoption of field service technology is set to increase.

The G Cloud framework simplifies procurement for public sector organisations, with organisations such as Kirona being selected as approved suppliers, thus speeding up the procurement process for many organisations within the public sector.

Field service technology can enable public sector organisations meet the challenge of delivering services with reduced budgets, and keep apace with today’s customer-centric approach to business, which sectors such as retail have traditionally championed. All hail the customer is king!

For more information on G-Cloud or the technology employed by North Lanarkshire Council, South Gloucestershire Council and Carpetright, take a look at Kirona.com

 

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Nick Shipton, Dynamic Resource Scheduling Executive, Kirona explains the importance of understanding your providers own roadmap for development when selecting a field service management solution...

The last piece I wrote for FSN focused on how I believe it’s important to utilise a scheduler that is flexible enough to allow for an organisation to cope with the different types of demand whilst still enabling customer expectations to be met and being as efficient as possible regarding how that demand is dispatched to the workforce.

For a leading field service scheduling software vendor ensuring that the software we provide ticks all these boxes is a challenge. We need to be certain that we are meeting our customer’s expectations by providing not only excellent support and service but also an innovative roadmap that keeps them engaged and moving forward on the solution ensuring they maximise their ROI and continue to deliver further efficiencies.

However there is also the need to look to new markets and prospects whose needs may differ from those of our core business.

The key is that we need to look at the solution as an enabler that enables our customers to retain a position that is at the forefront of their markets, whether that is in giving them a commercial edge or in the case of our customers in the public sector enabling them to cope with the additional strain on services, cuts in budgets and yet still give their customers the best possible service.

 

At Kirona we of course have a roadmap looking at the short, medium and long-term but for me its key that we look outside of our own internal team to drive the content of these, especially in regards to the short and medium term roadmap.

The long term roadmap is more strategic but still contains some customer consultation.

We have an excellent internal team on both the scheduling and mobile products who are constantly looking at new features driven by their own knowledge of our technology, the knowledge of our customer base and knowledge of new advances in our field.

However it’s very important that we don’t get too carried away before trying to understand whether our innovation is relevant to the customers and prospects needs.

Quite often you’ll find that exciting new features in products are great for the Sales Team as they look good in demos but when it comes to the day to day operations we find that users never see the benefits they were expecting.

For this reason at Kirona we always look to use the excellent forum of our user group to both plot and direct our roadmap.

Over half of our roadmap is fed by ideas and requirements from our current user base, and we also ensure that in every update we have between 30% and 50% of customer lead enhancements as this is key to ensuring that the product stays relevant for our customers, as listening to our customers is key and one of the main reasons we have such great customer retention and satisfaction.

Coming back to my original point, how do we as a software company ensure that what we offer gives the customer the flexibility they need in the product, and ensure that we as a company don’t go down a route that only offers a solution to a niche market.

For the answer to that question it’s about ensuring that we are selling into a diverse range of markets, but with the caveat that we always sense check whether any new market and new functionality for that market could be used across our customer base.

This extends further when you then look at our user group, which five years ago was exclusively public sector organisations and from that sector almost primarily housing repairs, whereas now we have representation from retail, healthcare, utilities, central government and facilities management organisations.

 

The important point for us as a software company is that all these different sectors are using the same suite of products just configured to suit their own needs and requirements, and from our customers point of view they get to see how other organisations are not just using the software in a different way but also that actually the goals and requirements of organisations from different sectors are not too far away from their own.

So in conclusion I feel it is very important that when looking for software its key that you don’t just look at the solution itself, you need to ensure that the solution isn’t getting stuck in a cul-de-sac and the provider is challenging themselves, their customers and their prospects to offer you a future.

 

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Kirona a leading field service mobilisation company, have announced it has been selected as a G-Cloud 8 Digital Framework supplier.

G-Cloud 8 is the latest version of the framework agreement from the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) which supports the UK Government’s policy to centrally manage the procurement of common goods and services through an integrated commercial function at the heart of government.

The G Cloud Framework can be used by organisations across the UK public sector including central government, local government, health, education, devolved administrations, emergency services, defence and not-for-profit organisations.

 

“We are delighted to have been awarded G-Cloud 8 supplier status by the Crown Commercial Service,” said Neil Harvey, CTO at Kirona. “This is testament to the strength of our offering and the quality of our team. The G-Cloud framework provides government organisations with the ideal marketplace to purchase high quality, cost-effective services. We are looking forward to new opportunities presented by the framework and to helping more government organisations improve their productivity and service.”

As a G-Cloud 8 Digital Marketplace approved supplier, Kirona will offer software as a service, including its Job Manager mobile application to enable delivery of data and services to field resources to carry out their job efficiently, eliminating paperwork, speed up job completion and support data capture on a range of platforms and devices. Kirona’s Xmbrace Dynamic Resource Scheduler provides intelligent appointments and dynamic scheduling of resources or assets.

 

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Find out more about Kirona in the Field Service Directory

 

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Nick Shipton of scheduling specialists Kirona outlines why flexibility is as much a key ingredient in scheduling as optimisation...

Mobilising field based staff is high on the agenda at the moment with many organisations looking to increase the effectiveness and efficiencies of their workforce alongside offering increased levels of customer service and satisfaction.

It is obviously key that in order to mobilise your field staff effectively a complimentary scheduling solution is required to efficiently organise the jobs before dispatching them at the appropriate time to the mobile device.

However, what is sometimes overlooked is an understanding that that scheduling solution may need to react to different types of work in different ways, and therefore it’s key that the solution offers flexible methods of scheduling to suit how you need to drive your organisation.

Organisations often offer a wide range of services to their customers which can result in diverse requirements in terms of how those services need to be accessed by the customer and how that demand needs to be planned, which can cause issues if your scheduler has been built to suit a particular vertical or service, and drives you to fit the service to the schedulers constraints rather than configure the schedule to suit the requirements.

Some services will require fairly simple allocation of one off tasks based on matching skill-sets to the type of work, but if you throw into the mix customers expecting appointments at the first point of contact whether that is via a phone call or self-service this simple offering becomes much more complex, especially if you also want to throw into the mix planned works and programmed works.

 

The key with offering an appointed service is that you need to be able to offer and steer the customer towards taking a slot which not only satisfies them in terms of service levels but also takes into account all the other jobs in the system at that point in time, and allows you at that first point of contact to firstly offer the most efficient slot for you organisation, therefore building in maximum efficiency for the workforce.

Even if your organisation has only a small proportion of these ‘fixed’ appointed jobs they become the key jobs in the solution to plan other work around that has a more flexible time window, as we can’t break the direct promise we’ve made to the customer via that appointment.

Generally planned works have a more flexible planning window so we may need to carry out the job within the next X days or complete the jobs once a week, or once a month but we are not too worried about when we carry it out within that period.

Most scheduling systems will handle this well as there is plenty of flexibility within the large planning window to continually optimise your routes until you are satisfied with the schedule, but if you have an appointment to satisfy then that can throw an expensive spanner in the works as the scheduler doesn’t have the ability to move it where it may want to.

To further complicate matters other services may be carrying out far more complex works such as those which have dependencies and sequencing of tasks required to ensure they are carried not only in the most efficient manner but also in the correct order, or have a service that needs to deal with a very high volume of jobs with a short duration within small geographical locations.

All of the above pose different scheduling questions and of course you could look at implementing different solutions for these different scenarios however you lose the ability to get a complete view of the workforce and lose the ability to look at whether further efficiencies can be gained by carrying out more work at one location whilst you have resources there.

Reporting also becomes a trickier task as you are unable to easily view within one system how different services or regions may be performing.

Analysis can then be done to look if the location and levels of field based staff are correct and whether with a slight adjustment to these levels and locations performance can be improved.

You can also start to look at hierarchical KPI’s, so right down to operative level we can start to look at where and how the business can be improved.

The ability to implement a truly flexible scheduling solution such as Kirona’s DRS not only allows you to both improve the day to day operation of the organisation but also analyse how it can continually improve.

 

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Nick Shipton of scheduling specialists Kirona takes a look at the importance of measuring performance and constantly shifting KPI focus in a journey of ongoing improvement...

Kirona recently collaborated with Field Service News and Bill Pollock from Strategies for Change, hosting an interesting webinar covering the key points raised in Bill’s field service benchmarking report.

During the webinar we discussed key trends across field service in terms of what organisation are looking to implement and improve in the future.

The most popular item on the agenda for UK and European organisations was to develop and improve metrics or KPI’s to measure performance.

The thought here was that organisations need to be measuring things better in order to improve and help with the following:

Customer demand for quicker response time

• Workforce utilisation & productivity
• Service process efficiencies
• Customer demand for improved asset availability

 

This if course is all very commendable and is absolutely the correct things to be striving for however, is developing new and improved ways for measuring what we are doing actually going to help us achieve these goals, or does it simply stop short and tell us simply how are we are doing today, last month, last year?

Back office systems, scheduling solutions and mobile solutions give us a whole wealth of potential data to look at and report upon (although those organisations who are yet to jump into the world of scheduling and mobile will only have the very basics), but are we using this data to the best of its ability.

Traditional KPI’s are great for telling us how we are doing now, allowing us to answer the question is the business performing to set metrics? But they stop short of actually giving any insight into how we can improve?

 

The setting of targets doesn’t answer the questions that allow us to improve, it merely creates a benchmark.

Having access to information that addresses; I am meeting the set number of field service jobs I need to complete today that’s great but could I do better if the organisation was configured differently.

The key point is that KPI’s are just a set of controls we like to put into a business to give us some comfort that we are running on track, which is as I say great but do they actually give us any view on how we could improve and deliver a better service to our customers, even if we are doing well.

For us at Kirona it’s about taking that wealth of data we have and giving tools to our customers  that not only allow them to look at the standard KPI’s to ensure they are on track but also to allow them to start analysing where they could get better and implement those improvements.

If you only currently have only a fairly static back office system your ability to get access to meaningful data is going to be very limited, however with scheduling and mobile solutions such as Kirona’s DRS and Kirona’s Job Manager solution you suddenly have an extra dimension to the quantity, quality and type of data available.

Analysing this in the correct way then allows an organisation to start pinpointing exactly where efficiencies in the business could be made.

This extra dimension of data enables the organisation to understanding questions such as;

 

• We may be completing our set number of jobs per day, but actually how much is it costing us to do that?
• Are some geographical areas better performing than others?
• Can we improve this by looking at the distribution of our workforce across those areas?
• Am I giving my customers the most efficient times for appointments for my organisation, and can I improve this without impacting my service?
• Am I deficient in certain skills and abilities in different regions?

 

Are we selling or completing certain services in specific areas of our region and therefore do we need to move the workforce around to support that, or could we be offering a higher level of service in those service areas?

In conclusion I believe what organisations should be looking at in addition to developing new and improved ways of measuring performance, is actually looking at ways at tools that enable your organisation to analyse your business to help improve your performance, without impacting on efficiency, keeping customers happy and attracting new customers.

 

Also if you want to keep ahead of your competitors, hitting your targets isn’t going to do this, the only way to do this is to continually challenge those targets, continual improve your business and analyse what the data is telling you.

Look beyond your KPI’s!

 

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BrightHouse is the UK’s leading rent-to-own retailer providing high quality, branded consumer electronics, domestic appliances and furniture via affordable weekly payments. They have 3,000 employees in a growing network of over 300 stores.

BrightHouse has implemented Kirona’s Job Manager mobile application to connect their central team with their field-based Customer Agent Advisers. This ensures accurate, up to date information flows seamlessly and securely between the two, enabling real-time visibility and that processes are streamlined to significantly improve customer service.

As well as Kirona’s Job Manager application, BrightHouse are also benefiting from Kirona’s InfoSuite management information software, ensuring the business has real-time actionable insight.

Alasdair Skeoch, Head of Credit Operations at BrightHouse commented “Kirona’s Job Manager and InfoSuite software has enabled us to improve customer service and empower our Customer Agent Advisers. Job Manager provides our Customer Agent Advisers with accurate, secure customer information when they meet with our customers. They have the latest account information, credit agreements and customer data to hand enabling them to serve the customer efficiently.”

 

He explains further “We are delighted with the initial implementation of the software and are looking for continual enhancements including implementing Kirona’s Dynamic Resource Scheduler, their Analytics tool to gain further actionable insights as well as applying the software to wider areas of the business.”

Kirona is a leader in delivering software solutions that enable organisations to provide exceptional field-based services in the most cost-effective way possible by providing clients with a suite of software that enables them to manage their end-to-end service processes and to seamlessly link field-based workers with central functions. Not only does this improve the service delivery to their customers it also reduces costs and enable significant efficiency and productivity increases.

Neil Harvey, CTO at Kirona, added “It takes an exceptional retailer to achieve real success in these challenging times and BrightHouse has seen sustained growth by giving customers the means to access quality household goods, and doing it with fairness, honesty and integrity. Many people probably take it for granted that they buy a new TV or a washing machine if they need one. But for millions of people this is not an option.  Many hard-working people do not have the cash to buy household essentials and home comforts outright, and are often ignored by mainstream lenders. BrightHouse successfully offer a way to bridge this financial gap. BrightHouse approached Kirona with a vision of how they wanted their service to improve, and we worked with them to deliver their Customer Agent Advisers a mobile workforce solution to enable them to achieve this.”

 

Neil continued “BrightHouse now has streamlined processes that are achieved by implementing Job Manager. By eradicating paper work from the field and information collected in the field is automatically posted into the relevant systems and necessary follow-up actions are triggered. Their Customer Agents are empowered by providing them with all of the information they need to perform the required task, while the customer benefits from the service efficiency that Job Manager has enabled.”

Kirona’s innovative technology enables organisations with mobile field based workers to improve productivity, customer service, field based worker visibility, reporting, and reduce costs.

 

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