Selection Services Transforms Field Service Division with Dexterra

Selection Services is dedicated to providing the very best services to its customers, with professionalism, commitment and flexibility being the company’s core values. Every day, Selection Services’ team of field service engineers make more than 200 customer site visits, and as the ‘face’ of the company, it was essential that Selection maximised the professionalism and productivity these frontline employees. 

The company had long been an advocate of mobile technology, having first started giving field personnel access to their service management system, Remedy, via a browser on HP Jornada 720 devices in 1998.  For the past five years, engineers had carried laptops to access this system remotely.  However, due the time it took to boot up, dial up and logon via the website just to find out details about which customer they were due to visit and what the job would entail, engineers largely stopped using the laptops, preferring to call the help desk for the information instead.  The browser-based application presented connectivity and reliability issues as well.

Selection Services wanted to adopt a proven mobility solution, which would overcome the problems of the cumbersome laptop and browser-based approach and ultimately improve customer service and engineer productivity.  It was also critical that the chosen solution could interface easily with its service management system, Remedy, and job allocation system, Retain, and reduce pressure on the call centre. 

Why Dexterra?

Dexterra was able to demonstrate that the Dexterra Concert platform could be integrated in a non-invasive manner directly into the management systems at the heart of Selection Services’ field service division, while ensuring that service engineers had the latest job information available on their hand-held device, whether they were in or out of network coverage, via Dexterra’s Field Service TransApp™ mobile application.

“There is a lot of hype in the market about enterprise mobility solutions, but very little evidence of them working smoothly in practice,” commented Alan Cantwell, CEO of Selection Services.  “Not only was Dexterra able to provide us with excellent customer references, but it was one of the few companies able to connect into our existing systems and support our service-level driven focus.”

The Dexterra application provides Selection Services field engineers with detailed information about upcoming jobs via their Orange M2000 PDAs.  Unlike the company’s previous browser based solution, Dexterra’s Concert platform works regardless of connectivity, providing an informed and up-to-date view of all the customer information required to fulfil each job in a way that is relevant to role, task and context.  Field service engineers are able to access this whenever and wherever they are working, even in remote areas and server rooms with little available connectivity.

Dexterra’s business process-driven methodology takes engineers through each job step by step, ensuring that all the necessary stages are completed and finishing with customer signature capture.  Each key step is time tracked, ensuring that customer service levels can be monitored and maintained.

Benefits

The biggest benefit that Selection Service has seen since implementing Dexterra, is the ability to accurately monitor and manage resources within the field service division.  Dexterra enables easy ”instant on” access to the PDA-based application, complete with accurate time stamping, so managers can check resourcing and maximise field staff productivity. This has led to a direct and significant improvement in customer service, with clients being informed of engineers’ whereabouts and job status at each stage following a call being logged. 

Overall, this degree of technology sophistication and professionalism in its field service operation has given Selection Services a competitive edge over its rivals, leading to an annual growth rate of 25 per cent in the division due to the investment in Dexterra and handheld devices. 

“Dexterra has been a great success all round.  Clients, prospects and even our governing body, Lloyds Register of Quality Assurance, have all been hugely impressed by the technology, our standard of service, and customer satisfaction levels within the field service division,” commented David Johnson, field service manager at Selection Services.  “This has been made possible due to the ease-of-use of Dexterra’s application, which ensured the wholehearted support of our engineers who have ultimately been responsible for service delivery.”

In addition to the business growth and increase in customer satisfaction, Selection Services has seen a number of other significant benefits since deploying Dexterra:

­ Up to 1000 (20 per cent) less calls into the call centre every month as engineers get all the information they need on the PDA.  This allows call centre operatives to respond more quickly to customers

­ An annual saving of approximately £25,000 in Remedy licences - Dexterra’s middleware quickly frees up the use of Remedy floating licences as engineers log on and off their PDAs, so fewer licences are required

­ Mobile call charges have come down by 80 per cent as engineers spend less time calling the helpdesk and the Dexterra devices don’t require an ‘always-on’ connection in order to deliver the right information to engineers


“Selection Services was an early adopter of mobile technology and had already seen some of the benefits of giving their mobile workforce access to job and customer information in the field. Dexterra has helped them to fully realise all the benefits of enterprise mobility, conquering the issues of connectivity and user acceptance that have been holding back widespread adoption, and leading them into the next generation of mobile computing,” commented Nigel Clarke, GM EMEA for Dexterra. 

Future

Regular customer satisfaction measurement is critical for a service-led company that wants to maintain a culture of continuous improvement and stay at the forefront in its field.  Recognising this, Selection Services plans to take advantage of additional functionality available within Dexterra’s field service and give the field service engineers the power to capture customer feedback on their PDAs while on site. This will ensure data is collected more often and is therefore a more accurate reflection of changing customer perceptions.

The company also hopes to empower its field service team even further, by giving them deeper access into Remedy, over and above their assigned jobs so they can proactively track the progress of previous customer visits. 

“Technology investment is critical to the future success of field service businesses,” said Alan Cantwell. “Dexterra has helped us unlock the full benefits of mobile field service that we have known were possible for many years.  Now our challenge is to continue to develop the application to ensure that our field service operation remains the benchmark for the rest of the industry.”

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