Optimize Your Mobile Techs

Using a field service scheduling solution, this national laundry facility service company increased tech productivity by two calls per day.

The concept of service as a differentiator isn't just marketing speak. More and more OEMs are treating their service centers as profit centers, according to results from the 2006 Chief Service Officer's Summit held by research firm AberdeenGroup. There, 71% of best-in-class OEMs reported their service operations are managed as a profit center, deriving more than 20% of overall profits from service. Now, if you're a service company, nearly all of your profits come from service – service is not only a differentiator, but your core competency, so you'd better be good at it. Aside from the skills of your technicians, being ‘good' at service largely rests on your responsiveness to customer calls. Wireless technology and applications can help you with that, as one service company, Mac-Gray, found. By implementing a real-time, field service application, including automated dispatching, Mac-Gray was able to improve call resolution time 43% and increase the productivity of its techs by two calls per day.

Mac-Gray services and maintains 63,000 commercial laundry rooms in 24 branch operating locations across the country, including academic institutions, laundromats, hotels and motels, and military and government facilities. The company employs 250 field technicians in dedicated locations to service the rooms. Mac-Gray is alerted to a service need by the users of the laundry rooms, who, via signage in the laundry facility, know to call 1-800-Mac-Gray or go to www.macgray.com to report a broken machine. The user notes the machine number and the location of the laundry facility; the call or Web alert is received by a Mac-Gray's customer service representative (CSR). The CSRs get any additional information and record the service call in the company's Solomon field service database. Then, the service side takes over.

When Mac-Gray first wanted to implement a mobile field service solution, it had only 100 technicians in 10 locations, mainly in the northeastern United States. The technicians were supported by six dispatchers. The dispatchers accessed the company's databases and viewed new service calls as recorded by the CSRs. Based on the technicians' service areas, the dispatchers assigned calls to each tech. Mac- Gray's problem lay in getting the calls and supporting information out to the techs.