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How can a service company avoid fines from a customer? A couple of unobvious advantages of process automation

The service business is experiencing mixed times: like all companies, they were affected by the pandemic and the accompanying crisis. But on the other hand, maintenance work has been increased - there has been increased cleaning, and sanitization of premises, and repair work that has not gone away. Therefore, the current situation is a good opportunity to “reload” processes in companies and do things that simply did not reach before. It is now obvious that it is necessary to automate everything to the maximum, reducing all possible costs.

Let me remind you that you are in touch with a product analyst at the HubEx domestic service desk. In this article I continue to talk about the experience of our client, a large service company "Brant". One of the constant “pains” in the provision of services is penalties on the part of the client, in this article we will talk about how to avoid them. And we will tell service colleagues other useful tips that will stop the crisis.



About the deadlines and how to observe them


All applications from customers come with a tight deadline. For violation of the terms penalties are provided. In the contracts for subscription services, a significant proportion of the work performed falls on regular scheduled preventive repairs according to schedules approved by both parties and regular seasonal work during specified periods.

Therefore, when planning work on the implementation of applications, several parameters must be taken into account simultaneously:

  • tight deadlines from customers on request
  • urgency of applications - depending on whether the emergency application or regular,
  • possible time to complete work at the facility
  • workload of a service specialist on a specific day
  • logistical reasonableness

Prior to the implementation of Service Desk,

Plans for service specialists were prepared “on leaflets”. It happened that when preparing the plan, the dispatcher did not take into account all the necessary parameters, did not evaluate the employee’s workload for the coming days, and forgot to look at the schedule of planned work. Human factor! Result: late applications and penalties.

After the implementation of Service Desk, the

use of our system allowed Brant:

  1. See the entire volume of applications for the site of a particular dispatcher, the area of ​​a specific Service specialist, project or company as a whole and adjust the situation in cases where there is a threat of violation of deadlines due to the large number of applications from the specialist.
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  4. See logistics when preparing a plan. When assigning an application to an executor, the system displays on the map the remoteness from the place where the executor is currently at to the place where it is necessary to fulfill the application.

It is especially important that our system has a task scheduler and a personal calendar for each field employee. You can see all the planned applications for today / tomorrow, or for the selected period, as well as their geographical distribution map.

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Result: it became possible to plan a uniform, efficient and long-term loading of each service specialist. Now the dispatcher is armed with a clear and convenient planning tool, and the service specialist has a clear work plan.

About penalties


A number of large customers, such as the federal grocery chain, require contractors to close applications in a timely manner and follow formal reporting in their system.

Example: applications in “1C: ToyR” of the customer must be closed correctly and on time. This includes clearly filling out all the fields, choosing the right type of work from the drop-down lists with dozens of items, and many other “fascinating” stages of closing an application. On average, a dispatcher takes about five minutes to complete one given procedure, and we will recall the applications! - up to 200 every day.

An incorrectly closed application in “ToR” entails penalties on the part of the customer, up to the fact that the work may not be paid, even if done in fact.


When you try to close an application in the MRO program according to all the rules

Compliance with the reporting is equally important: one of the Brant customers, in addition to the acts of work performed, asks to provide at least 3 photos BEFORE and AFTER the work done for each application (this has become one of the mandatory requirements).

Prior to the implementation of Service Desk

As we already said, before all working communication was conducted in instant messengers. In a dialogue with a specific engineer, hundreds of photographs were accumulated, which in a couple of days became difficult to identify with applications.

After implementing Service Desk

Recording the results of your work is a good practice. It allows not only to establish control over the implementation of work, but also to defend the interests of the service organization in the event of complaints about the quality of the service provided. In the system configuration for Brant, the system requires the contractor to attach a photo of the malfunction, until it is fixed and a photo of the repair performed. Photofixing BEFORE and AFTER repair, for each application, allows you to control the fact of repair, save history, and organize information for subsequent analysis.

For example, the customer indicated in the application the type of repair: “Door breakage”. The photograph sent by the service specialist shows that the door has been removed from the hinges and the glass has been broken - and this is a different kind of work, with different deadlines and a higher repair cost.

To approve all details with the customer in a timely manner is an important point that will allow you to comply with SLA and correctly take into account the cost of work.

Brant broadcast this practice to the rest of its customers: now each closed application contains a photo before / after, as well as closing documents in digital form. More than once, this helped the service company to avoid disputes, fines, and once - even a lawsuit.

Summary


The introduction of the service desk allowed Brant to “rise to the next stage of its own development”: with a sharply increased volume of services, not only did not reduce the quality of service, but also achieve its improvement.

Automation of processes gave an instant result in the form of cost optimization and increasing the efficiency of all internal processes of the company from receiving an application to its implementation. When introducing our HubEx automation system as the main working tool, additional features were found that were not included in the initial list of platform requirements. So, after solving the main structural problems of the company, a Quality Control Department was created, an objective and transparent system of employee motivation was introduced for everyone, and a system of scheduled preventive repairs was introduced. The plans: recording the working hours of service specialists, creating a database of technical documentation for serviced objects.

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