Prior to the introduction of the Optimatics software, M2 operations managers had to rely on heavily manual processes to track, schedule or close off jobs with engineers.
According to M2, the customer services team was fielding an average of 700 calls a day, many of which were from the engineers calling in to check for messages or to request their next job. Each new job typically took 10 minutes to brief and with so many engineers calling in, this often resulted in a backlog of calls. This had an impact on other engineers getting through making them wait for their next job instruction and also meant that M2’s customers were kept waiting on the lines longer than necessary.
With the introduction of the Aeromark Optimatics system, operation managers are able to see in real-time the exact location of engineers during the working day. The company has reported a number of operational benefits since the software was implemented, including a reduction in fuel cost; improved travel time; enhanced communication with the engineers; better allocation of engineers to jobs and removal of a number of manual engineering tasks – all resulting in greater productivity and a better customer service record.
The customer services team can now dispatch jobs directly to the engineers’ smartphones and the workflows ensure the engineers receive and capture all of the right information whilst onsite, including their business and private mileage.
The company now aims to deploy Optimatics’ map based workforce scheduling to further reduce monthly mileage whilst increasing the number of customer site visits each engineer is making per day.
‘Our call dispatch process was manual and our engineers used to have to call into our customer services team to close off a job and get their next one. The engineers used to write notes on pieces of paper and look up addresses using Google Maps. It wasn’t very efficient,’ explained Melanie Ganley, customer service manager at M2.
‘Since deploying Aeromark’s solution we’ve seen a 50% reduction in the number of inbound calls to our customer services team. This has allowed us to retrain and skill up our customer services team so that they are now able to fix 15% of the problems over the phone without the need to send an engineer to site. The 15% phone based first time fix rate has also resulted in 15% fewer site visits which has enabled M2 to decrease the running costs of its engineering fleet by 15% in line with this,’ she added.