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Customer Profiles: Medical Supply Company

When doctors need drugs in an emergency room, they need them in a hurry. As controlled substances, however, many drugs must stay under lock and key. Too much security can delay life-saving procedures. Too little security can lead to theft and substance abuse.

A major Datria customer develops and maintains machines that balance the need for security with the need for rapid access to critical pharmaceuticals. The machines are sophisticated and secure dispensers that allow authorized medical staff to access controlled substances using a password or biometric identification. The dispensers ensure that patients get the correct medicines quickly and consistently but only when properly authorized. Everyday, these dispensing machines play a critical role in countless life-or-death situations. As such, the company must ensure that their products are always in good working order at some 5,000 customer sites. To do this, they deploy more than 400 field service technicians in the United States and Canada, each of whom handles three to six service calls per day.

To coordinate and dispatch their field technicians, the company used to maintain a call center that was staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Field service technicians called in to receive new service orders, and update or close out existing orders. With 15 dispatchers covering multiple shifts, the center managed the multiple calls required for each service order. Call center staff members gathered information from field technicians and entered it into PeopleSoft® Field Service 8.4, the company’s scheduling and dispatch application.

The system worked but it didn’t work efficiently. In particular, the system didn’t scale well. For instance, the average hold time was about 30 seconds but could stretch to as long as ten minutes during heavy call periods. Even 30 seconds reduced productivity significantly. With as many as 2,000 calls per day, the field organization could spend as much as 16.6 hours per day just waiting on hold.

To address these issues, the company decided to search for a real-time, self-service system that would improve productivity and information accuracy while reducing overall costs. The search was bounded by several practical parameters:

• The field service organization includes both company employees and third-party contractors. The company wanted a single, unified solution for all technicians.
• The company wanted true real-time information flowing to and from the technicians as opposed to batch updates that might be synchronized only once per shift. At the same time, the company wanted to reduce transcription errors.
• Given the realities of turnover in many field service organizations, the company wanted a solution that requires minimal training.
• Given the nature of the work, a high degree of security was required.
• The company also wanted to minimize access costs, such as monthly fees to wireless service providers.

The company ultimately selected Datria Ticket Management 2.0, a voice-enabled application for field service management. Ticket Management uses voice recognition technologies to communicate with technicians via telephone. Technicians can use any phone, anywhere in the world, at any time of day or night.

When a technician calls, Ticket Management answers — with no hold time at all. Using biometric voice verification, Ticket Management identifies the technician and begins a conversation designed to gather information for PeopleSoft Field Service. For instance, Ticket Management may ask questions about a given service order. The technician simply answers in natural language. Ticket Management converts the voice information to data and updates the appropriate fields in PeopleSoft. In addition, Ticket Management “reads” the data in PeopleSoft, converts it to voice, and speaks it to the technician.

Another feature of Ticket Management helps improve customer satisfaction. After receiving a service order, technicians are supposed to call the customer to give an estimated time of arrival and to gather additional details. Using the traditional system, this was sometimes difficult to accomplish. Ticket Management facilitates the process by automatically transferring the technician to the customer. This helps ensure that customer expectations are appropriately set and that the technician is prepared with the right tools and parts when he or she arrives at the job site.

Ticket Management met the company’s requirements for true real-time information, short training cycles, and a unified solution for all technicians. It also improved the value of the company’s investment in PeopleSoft. With real-time data in the application, anyone in the organization can check PeopleSoft at anytime to get an accurate update on the status of service orders.

Ticket Management began to absorb calls quickly. In the first full month after going live, the system handled 12,558 calls or about half the normal monthly call volume. In addition to improving productivity, the company was able to reassign half the dispatchers in their call center to customer-facing tasks. This not only reduced the cost of supporting the field technicians, it also improved communications with customers.

Business Benefits

Real-time information flowing to and from field service technicians

• Deploy resources more efficiently; act and react more quickly
• Solve problems more quickly
• Communicate with customers more effectively

Off-load majority of call volume

• Reduce call center costs
• Re-deploy call center staff to customer-facing roles
• Eliminate hold time; regain productive time

Solution based on phones and voice

• Unified solution for employees and contractors
• Easy-to-learn; fast to roll out
• No additional devices to carry, support, maintain
• No need to synchronize devices
• No additional air-time service fees