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Customer Profiles: Bell Canada

Bell Canada uses Ticket Management in French and English to reduce transaction time by 50%.

When looking to improve communications with its field service workforce, the largest telecommunications provider in Canada decided speech was the best answer. Bell Canada, an early advocate of voice-enabled applications, now utilizes one of the most sophisticated voice-enabled field service applications in the world. Nearly 3,000 Bell Canada field representatives use Datria Ticket Management™ to perform more than 20 business functions, using only a voice and a phone.

Single-line and small business telephone technicians within Bell Canada previously relied on laptops to perform the same functions. By and large, the laptops fulfilled the functions adequately. Unfortunately, they were also expensive and inefficient. Each machine cost over $4,500 including maintenance costs. Additionally, computer glitches like long waits for boot-up and connection, screen damage, dead batteries, and broken modem clips made the solution unreliable. When the laptops didn’t work, neither did the technicians

With Datria Ticket Management, Bell Canada’s field representatives now use a telephone to talk directly to the company’s existing workforce management systems. Technicians simply call the system and begin speaking – in French or English. Datria responds in the same language. Technicians can work with trouble tickets, and retrieve or report information on customers, billing, parts, time and attendance, or vehicles. Ticket Management converts their voice to data and updates the appropriate backend system. Ticket Management then “reads” the backend system, converts the data to voice, and speaks it to the technician. Technicians need to use only their voice and their ears.

The path to a voice-enabled solution was not always clear, however. Bell Canada initially approached the problem with a traditional data processing framework. As Serge Lafleur, the General Manager for Customer Operations/Ontario East, explains: “We already had the applications running on our laptops. At first we thought we simply had to put a voice prompt on every field in each application. Datria helped us understand how to design a true voice application. Voice is different than traditional GUI-based applications. It’s not harder; it’s just different. Once we understood that, we moved very quickly.”

Today approximately 2,100 technicians use Ticket Management during the winter months. As activity increases in the spring and summer, the number rises to approximately 2,900 technicians. Previously, Bell Canada had to buy laptops for the maximum number of users. A significant number of those systems went unused for six months a year. Today, the company simply turns on additional phone ports as demand rises. When demand falls, the company turns those same ports to other uses.

The Datria system has also boosted productivity, primarily by recapturing lost time. With the laptop system, it took technicians an average of 20 minutes to log in and report their work. With Datria Ticket Management, it takes only 8 to 10 minutes. Technicians are expected to call in after they finish each trouble ticket. Depending on the number of tickets closed each day, technicians can recapture as much as 70 minutes of lost time per day.

The main benefit of the system, however, is cost reduction. As LaFleur notes, “We estimate that we save $10 to $15 million per year compared to the old laptop system.”

Encouraged by the results with single-line and small business installation, Bell Canada rolled out Ticket Management to its coin technicians — the field technicians that repair payphones. Within a few weeks of deployment, the coin technicians could complete an extra job per day because of the time they saved managing tickets. For Bell Canada, that’s a compelling business case for voice self-service for field operations.

As Lafleur says, “Speech provided us with the independence we were looking for, without removing the business function that the technicians need. The PDA solutions we looked at didn’t give us the independence and low cost that we wanted. With Datria, it’s as easy as speaking into a phone.”

Business Benefits

• Improved Productivity — One additional job per technician per day— Recapture as much as 70 minutes of lost time per day.
• Reduced Costs — Replaced ruggedized laptops with telephones.
• Revenue Implications — It’s easy to add new line items to a ticket, making it simpler for a technician to record and bill for all services performed at a site.

Thin Client Benefits

• Universally available
• Easily replaced — losing a phone does not impact productivity
• If a business process changes, only the server needs to be updated
• No data on device — simpler and more secure