End-to-end
Field Service
Management
Building end-to-end field service management
solutions around your unique business processes
mplsystems understands that the key objective for any service management organisation is to offer clients excellent and responsive service, whilst managing the cost and efficiency of their team. However, too often businesses invest in overly complex field service management systems that hinder team performance rather than optimise it, resulting in employees returning to high levels of manual processes and dramatically affecting the level of service delivered. In contrast, mplsystems’ unique modular approach enables us to build cost-effective service management solutions around each organisations individual processes and requirements, whether they have 10 or 1,000 field based workers. The solution encompasses everything from customer self-service, service desk and workforce scheduling to the mobile apps for field based teams, and integrates with all existing systems across the business to create a seamless flow of information. The result is a completely integrated end-to-end solution which can transform service delivery by automating manual processes, improve customer experience and provide analytical insight across a business’s operations.
Due to the unique capabilities of our solution, some of the world’s leading organisations including Cofely, Balfour Beatty Workplace and Metric Group have transformed the way they work achieving up to 76% reduction in on-going IT costs, saving over 2,000 hours of maintenance time and improving first time fix rate by 20% through a more efficient and streamlined way of working.
Every business has its individual business processes and specific
priorities, so why accept one size fits all systems?
mplsystems end-to-end
service management
solutions
Workforce Scheduling Contracts, Sales & Invoicing Customer Self-Service Multi-Channel Contact Centre Service Desk Software
Customer Self-Service
mplsystems hosted web portals and mobile apps provides a simple, flexible way for clients to update and log new requests or to check current issues and job progress at a time that suits them without the need for human interaction. These self-service solutions are customisable to suit specific business requirements and fully integrated into the end-to-end service management process.
Workforce Scheduling
mplsystems offer a truly unique
scheduling solution, encompassing 3 visual representations of jobs and engineers: a live map showing all engineers locations, a full list of job requests and a comprehensive view of the engineering team’s diaries. This allows customer requests to be automatically scheduled based on location, skills, technician workload or other business priorities.
Additionally jobs can be dynamically assigned or priorities changed by simple drag and drop functionality and filtering of activities.
Service Desk Software
mplsystems offer an extensive multi-channel customer care and case management solution which brings together voice, email, chat, SMS and social media and provides CRM customer service capability. This solution integrates with back office systems, providing the service desk with a complete view of customer’s cases and jobs, along with all associated emails, contact history and back office data such as orders, accounts and images.
Mobile Field Service Apps
mplsystems mobile field service apps are available for all the leading smartphone and tablet platforms, including iOS, Android and Windows and provide two-way
communications between the service desk and field worker. Each app is designed around a business’s specific needs and can extend beyond the basic push of job requests and can incorporate additional features such as quoting tools, parts ordering and invoicing to increase the productivity of the engineer.
With the growing popularity of smart phones, customers expect to have immediate visibility and control when interacting with a business.
mplsystems’ online portals and mobile apps offer this control by providing customers with a simple and flexible way to create, change or cancel job requests, at a time that suits them, without the need to call the service desk. As the online portals are completely integrated into the end-to-end service management process, the customer is able to view and amend-to-end all relevant account information, outstanding job requests and job status’ which is fed back to the service desk. The online portals feed information straight to the engineer’s mobile devices, reducing workload on the service desk and creating real-time updates for the engineers.
Integrating a client mobile app in to the existing business technology can be relatively straight forward and cost-effective. mplsystems apps are designed to allow customers to view and update all information including account details, problem reporting, billing and other areas that are crucial to your business.
The app allows the customer to make appointments at a time that suits them, eliminating the restrictions of the service desk opening times. Call back capability can be included allowing the customer to contact your service desk without having to wait on hold. Once their enquiry reaches the front of the queue, the service desk team will call them back.
+ 24/7 access for customers to make, amend or cancel service requests
+ Alleviate high volumes of requests going through the service desk + Easily customisable to fit specific and changing business
processes
+ Completely integrated to support end-to-end service delivery
Key
Benefits
The customer’s ability to easily arrange service calls or get status
updates with a company is an important element of how a
service organisation is viewed by its customers.
Robert Woodhead is an award winning Construction Company operating across the East Midlands and South Yorkshire.
Experiencing steady growth, Robert Woodhead realised an opportunity to
differentiate their business by providing online self-service.
The portal means customers no longer have to call or email the service desk to request a job, they are able to access the portal 24/7 and have full visibility of their request from initiation
The team at Woodhead One see our solution from mplsystems as a
true differentiator and a feature that is now helping us win new business.
Customers no longer have to call or email the service desk to request a job,
they are able to access the portal 24/7 and have full visibility of their request
from initiation to completion.
to completion. Clients have visibility of their account status and billing, enabling them to optimise their business operations.
+ Create a single view of the customer and job requests
+ Reduction in on-going IT costs by integrating all systems in to one simple user interface
+ Increase agent efficiency through simplifying processes + Reduce call handling time on the service desk
Key
Benefits
The service desk acts as the glue between the customers and
the field service operatives and as such have to not only deal
with high volumes of incoming customer enquiries from multiple
service channels, they then have to convey the right information,
to the right engineer at the right time to complete the job
successfully.
Service Desk
However, the reality is that most service desks waste time searching for the relevant emails, orders, plans or parts.
mplsystems blend all calls, email and SMS together with case management and CRM on to a single desktop view. The result is that if a customer calls in regarding a specific case, the agent screen is immediately populated with everything regarding that case and customer, including calls, emails, visit reports, plans and other relevant files. This complete customer care solution integrates with all key back office systems, helping streamline the customer experience by providing the service team with a single customer view on an intuitive user interface. This allows the service desk to seamlessly manage all customer interactions whilst the system automatically pushes updates and notifications to the engineer’s mobile devices.
“Working with a single agent desktop has helped to improve all aspects of our
operational performance. We’ve seen a step change in performance improvement – not only encouraging effortless conversations with our customers but also ensuring that we can keep on increasing our service agility. Applying the functionality of the mplsystems desktop to our streamlined processes is making a real difference – we’re becoming much more efficient at allocating jobs, we’re completing those tasks quicker, and our front-end staff are much more knowledgeable. We’re also starting to see some real KPI improvements.”
Lee Dobbins, General Manager
Cofely was keen to identify a solution that could offer a dedicated contact handling and CRM system tailored to their needs, as they found off the shelf solutions couldn’t fit their bespoke requirements.
mplsystems designed and implemented a highly flexible service desk solution that brings together the various business systems and customer data in to a simple and easy-to-use solution for all interaction handling. When a client calls the operations centre, the agent screen is populated with relevant case history, recommended process steps, any SLA details, and status of all jobs associated with that
contract. The agent does not need to access different applications during the course of the call and can quickly transfer the job through to planners for service scheduling.
+ One single, simplified view of the entire service delivery team and schedule
+ A live map of engineering teams location
+ Functionality to drag and drop jobs on to the engineers calendar for reactive jobs
+ Reduce service desk workload by automatically scheduling service requests
Key
Benefits
Workforce Scheduling
Instead, the mplsystems scheduling solution enables a business to optimise algorithms around their own individual parameters and is designed to be visual and simple for customer care staff. The solution features a flexible three screen representation of service delivery that enables schedule optimisation:
1. A dynamic map view that streamlines the scheduling and allocation of tasks 2. Field service engineer’s calendar view showing all jobs and locations 3. A complete list of jobs that can be filtered using a range of parameters.
These three views can be toggled separately or displayed concurrently on a single screen. When the service desk receives a call, helpdesk staff simply drag and drop the task onto the appropriate field engineer’s schedule. This action updates diaries and transfers all relevant task information to the engineer’s mobile Android, iOS or Windows Mobile device.
This real-time geographic scheduling allows routine decisions to be made automatically, whilst providing a simple drag drop alternative for the service team to use their expertise to make difficult and reactive decisions. This allows organisations to make best use of the available resources while managing customer response times and calendar availability.
Traditional scheduling tools are typically overly complex,
The Statutory Support Services Group is a national provider of specialist building maintenance services and rely on a 24 hour 365 day manned helpdesk to manage and efficiently balance the provision of pre-planned maintenance and reactive jobs.
After experiencing steady growth the business was finding their current scheduling system was both over-complex and didn’t have the degree of flexibility they needed and therefore embarked on a project with mplsystems to implement a true end-to-end service management solution.
“We previously worked with a legacy Maximo scheduling system that proved
both over-complex and inflexible, so we were keen to move towards a more
comprehensive, end-to-end service management solution that would allow
us to deliver more dynamic and efficient scheduling, especially for reactive
job requests,”
comments Adam Clarke, Managing Director at Statutory Support Services UK.“We looked at a number of alternatives, but only mplsystems –
with its cloud-based solution – could give us the end-to-end solution and the
visibility we needed across our entire maintenance services operation.”
mplsystems solution allowed SSS UK to deliver more dynamic and efficient scheduling and better manage the mix between planned and reactive jobs. The scheduling system automatically pushes job requests to the engineers’ mobile devices whilst providing a real-time view of all current maintenance activities across the organisation to give the service desk full visibility in order to update the customers.
Huge investment can be made in CRM, the contact centre and the customer service function but, as 80% of contact is between the field worker and the customer and only 20% with the contact centre, it’s clear that getting the mobile worker solution right is a key part of an end-to-end solution.
mplsystems’ mobile field service apps link the mobile field worker directly to the contact centre. Whether they are engineers, sales people, cleaners or other service personnel these customised apps are unique amongst other field workforce solutions in their ability to connect those field staff directly to the customer service agent’s desktop, not just into CRM or ERP systems. mplsystems mobile apps extend far beyond basic job notification technology and can equip field based teams with additional features such as quoting tools, parts ordering and invoicing and are available for all the leading smartphone and tablet platforms, including iOS, Android and Windows devices. Every mobile app is different, when specifying an app we understand each businesses requirements for data, process and communications and build a solution around these requirements.
+ Manage field workforce more effectively with complete visibility of location
+ Direct connection to contact centre for consistent customer relationship
+ Access via practical hand-held devices
+ Customer information available from anywhere
+ Operates without network coverage in off line mode by utilising local database
Key
Benefits
The principal reason organisations fail to deliver customer
service is the lack of real time communications with their
field-based workforce.
Metric Group is a leading provider of car park payment terminals and ticketing solutions, and is committed to providing its customers with the highest levels of service and support, however the business was determined to improve the quality of the processes and
information that could help its support teams perform more effectively.
As part of the end-to-end service management solution, mplsystems designed specialist mobile apps that uses the power of smartphone technology to synchronise data, automate business processes and enable more accurate monitoring and reporting between the mobile field
workforce and both front and back- office operations. The mobile app directly addresses the lack of real time communications that most organisations have with their field-based operations. The latest mobile technology ensures accurate and up-to-the-minute information, helps minimise response times, and always ensures that field engineers are connected with key back-office systems such as ERP, stock control and parts ordering.
For Metric Group, working with mplsystems has meant that they have been able to gain greater control over their field service operations and improve team productivity by 15%. The mobile apps have had a huge impact on the field based teams and have helped achieved a further 15% improvement in response times.
