Ticket Management

If you’re like many field service organizations, you use a ticketing process to schedule, dispatch, and manage your field activities. When a problem is identified, you open a trouble ticket to manage the process of responding and resolving the issue.

A lot of information is associated with each ticket — including customer name and address, identification numbers, start and stop times, problem categories, degree of urgency, skills requirements, parts requirements, parts availability, warranty data, service level agreements, vehicle data, access conditions, and so on.

If any of the information is inaccurate or arrives late, problems start to compound quickly. Productivity suffers. Technicians arrive late. Truck rolls increase. Technicians arrive with the wrong parts. Bills are inaccurate. Overtime costs rise. Customers fume.

We’ve designed Datria Ticket Management to help you control and improve this process. Datria Ticket Management includes 17 pre-packaged call flows that address the most common and most pressing issues of field service management.

• Ticket Management Call Flows
• Login/Biometric Security
• Dispatch Job
• Job Information
• Customer Information
• Change Status
• Create Job (Open Ticket)
• Add Line Item
• Complete Job (Close Ticket)
• Customer Acceptance
• Attendance Reporting (Sick call)
• Time Reporting
• Expense Reporting
• Parts Usage & Re-ordering
• User Help & Call Handling
• Test Request
• Messaging
• Field Billing

Ticket Management customers have reported significant improvements, including the following:

• An additional job-and-a-half per technician per day
• $10 to $15 million annual savings
• 15% increase in number of sites served with no increase in personnel
• Accelerated billing cycles by an average of five days
• Improved information accuracy; reduced re-keying
• Reduced costs; substituted phones for laptops
• Reduced overtime costs by 22%
• Moved from four-hour to two-hour scheduling window
• Service revenues increased 18%
• Reduced time need to respond to emergency call from 60 minutes to 30 minutes

Storm Recovery

Floods, Tornados, Hail, Lightning, Hurricanes. Repairing the damage and restoring service after a major storm can cost millions of dollars in repairs and lost revenue. Managing hastily assembled emergency crews — including both local and on-loan technicians — is a costly and inefficient process that places high demands on call centers. Communicating with customers is often confusing and piecemeal and can erode customer confidence and satisfaction.

Available since 2001, Datria Storm Recovery™ is the first packaged voice self-service application designed to aid field technicians in restoring and repairing utility equipment. Storm Recovery eliminates major bottlenecks by allowing emergency crews to talk and listen to your existing work order management and scheduling system. All they need is a phone or a two-way radio.

Storm Recovery can have a dramatic impact on your weather-related processes, including:

• Avoid performance fines — You get the data you need to communicate effectively and precisely with your local public utilities commission — all of which can favorably affect Performance Based Rate reviews.
• Improved customer satisfaction — Predictability is everything to customers. With Datria Storm Recovery, you’ll have the data to make more accurate and more precise predictions.
• Very little staffing is required — You don’t need to staff up a call center to communicate with emergency crews. Datria Storm Recovery can scale upward or downward very quickly.
• Faster recovery time — Because information flows in real-time, you have a better understanding of the situation as it exists right now. You can act and react more quickly and deploy your resources more effectively.
• Improved crew productivity — Skills-based dispatching and real-time information flows can dramatically improve productivity. You can also minimize re-work. Without Datria Storm Recovery, you may dispatch multiple crews to work on the same problem. It may be difficult to tell if a newly reported problem is already in the queue. With real-time data, you have a better view of the big picture.
• Fast start-up time — You can train a “foreign” crew and begin dispatching trouble tickets to them in as little as half an hour.

Scouting & Inspection

When something goes wrong, time is not on your side. You need to know what happened, what needs to be done, and who’s responsible as quickly as possible. You also need to know who’s available to fix the problem, what parts and tools they need, and who needs to be notified.

Datria Scouting & Inspection can help you get the information you need faster and more efficiently. In fact, it’s the simplest, lowest cost method to get real-time information flowing from the field to headquarters (and back again).

Scouting & Inspection takes advantage of equipment you already have: voices, telephones, two-way radios, as well as workforce management, outage management, asset management, and scheduling software. Your scouts call in a problem; Datria Scouting & Inspection asks questions about the nature and severity of the problem, the infrastructure affected, and the type of repair work that needs to be done. The scout simply answers the questions in natural language.

Datria converts the voice to data and updates your system. In a single call, the scout — who may be your employee or a member of an on-loan crew — can update multiple applications, including outage management, workforce management, scouting, ticket management, scheduling, and parts replenishment.

Scouting & Inspection supports both Class 1 and Class 2 inspections. Depending on the context — and your requirements — Scouting & Inspection can ask general questions or detailed questions. You can change from one mode to the other on the fly. You can also mix modes based on a variety of attributes, including technician type, problem category, location, etc.

Scouting & Inspection can also capture a variety of location attributes. These include GPS, State Plane Coordinate Systems, and street addresses. In a very short period of time, your system knows all the major attributes of the problem and precisely where it’s located. You get better information and you get it more quickly. You can respond with a better understanding of what’s needed and how long the repair will take. You can also share information more effectively with other agencies that need to know.

Datria Scouting & Inspection delivers a number of benefits, including:

• Easier to integrate foreign crews — after many weather events, you need to integrate workers on loan from other agencies. They know how to do the work but they don’t know how to report the work to your system. Do you break up your crews so you can send one of your employees in each foreign truck? With Datria Scouting & Inspection, you don’t need to. With Datria applications, foreign crews simply answer questions. It’s simple, fast, and effective.
• A smaller storm pantry — the only special equipment needed to use a Datria application is a telephone or a two-way radio. You can take a lot of specialized and expensive equipment out of your storm pantry.
• Create a ticket from the field — in one call, your scout can not only report a problem but can also create a trouble ticket to enter into the system. Your system can schedule the work, identify the appropriate crew, schedule any specialized parts or tools, and get the process started. You move from problem reported to problem solved more quickly than ever.
• Easier to work with the public utilities commission — you get accurate information more quickly than ever before. You can make more accurate predictions and share them more effectively with other public agencies. This can help you avoid significant fines.
• Less duplication of reporting and effort — when a problem occurs, it’s often reported multiple times. It may be difficult to determine if it’s one problem or multiple problems. With Datria’s field-based ticket creation, it’s much easier to tell that a problem has been reported and is currently in the queue.
• Your system acts like it’s integrated — if you’re like most companies, you have multiple applications running your operation. Often, they’re not well integrated with each other. Scouting & Inspection acts like a natural language front-end to all your relevant applications. Your scouts won’t even know that they’re talking to and updating multiple applications. They just talk. Datria does the rest. It’s the simplest, fastest way to integrate disparate software.