DISH Puts Its Focus On Customer Experience

By Brian Albright, Field Technologies

DISH’s mobile solution upgrade has unlocked opportunities to improve customer service, including 75-minute appointment windows and a customer-facing mobile app.

As the second-largest satellite television provider in the U.S., DISH operates a massive field service network. The company has 170 field offices and more than 5,000 vehicles. In addition to its thousands of service technicians, there are another 5,000 to 7,000 third-party technicians working for the company at any given time, depending on the season.

With roughly 14 million television and broadband subscribers and more than $15 billion in revenue, just about every move the company makes is big, including its investments to improve field service operations. When DISH initially rolled out a mobile solution for its field technicians in 2009, it was touted as the largest rollout of a completely cloud-based mobile workforce management solution up to that point. The company deployed the TOA Technologies ETAdirect (which is now Oracle Field Service Cloud) solution to its field force of more than 14,000 technicians in less than four months following a nationwide rollout of highly rugged laptops for its vehicles.

DISH selected TOA initially because the solution would both help improve efficiency and reduce costs, as well as improve the customer experience by providing shorter appointment windows. The solution included an integrated capacity management software and proactive customer communications, and could accurately route more than 10,000 jobs in 4 minutes (according to TOA’s estimates). The solution was also based on HTML5, making it hardware agnostic.