Mobile Technology to Help Meet SLAs

Posted on 17 March 2010

My previous post here touched on the developments of remote mobile worker technology and how advances have made it easier for businesses to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with their customers.  I’d now like to delve further into this topic as you may be surprised to know just how this is achieved. For those who aren’t familiar, SLAs are negotiated agreements between the customer and the service provider. These can be formal and legally binding or merely an informal agreement. Either way, SLAs define expectations of what work/service is to be carried out at a given time and/or place.

By implementing a mobile data solution, an organisation can significantly increase its mobile workforce efficiency and productivity, often by increasing the number of jobs completed per day or by saving administration time lost through paperwork. I’ve previously detailed these and other benefits of mobile data solutions. However, the over-riding benefit is that of transparency and it is this transparency which enables you to proactively manage and meet your SLAs.

So here’s the situation; you have a number of mobile workers in the field each day, hopefully all hard working, diligent and conscientious. However, no matter how hard you seem to try, you still receive a steady stream of queries from your customers which impact invoicing! The variants on these queries will depend upon your business, but largely maintain a similar theme:

• Are you sure your worker/technician/engineer actually called?
• We haven’t received the service/work/delivery as promised, why not?
• You’re claiming user damage, but it was fine when it left our depot. Did your team damage it?
• We’ve incurred additional costs due to the delayed delivery/work! What discount will you offer us?

In all of the above cases, it’s the limited availability of information and restricted audit trails which create the issues. Either they can’t justify payments or potentially, they’re trying to reduce costs at your expense!
So where does a mobile data solution come into the fray? Well the purpose of the solution is to record and centralise data, increasing the visibility of activity and records of work done. A full mobile data solution enables you to:

• Geotag (based on longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates) the arrival of a mobile worker, accompanied by an automatic data and time stamp
• Capture images of the situation encountered; potentially an already damaged unit or a locked gate preventing entry to the work site
• Detail any parts or materials used and in what varying quantities
• Note down any requirements, issues or recommendations given to the customer
• Obtain an electronic signature from your customer agreeing they have received/approved the work carried out and again, automatically date and time stamp this entry.

All of this valuable information can then be loaded onto a customer profile or account within a portal, allowing customers to use their unique ID and password to access a full history of what work has been done by which members of your mobile workforce at their premises. They will be able to view individual jobs, what time workers arrived on location, what materials were used and in what quantities, a photo of the finished work or any problems encountered and most importantly, who then subsequently signed it all off. In short, your customer will be able to see every activity which occurred, showing just how transparent you’re being from start to finish.

Now just imagine the impact all this could potentially have on customer queries against invoices, giving you  the information needed to avoid unnecessary and unwarranted discounts or refunds; increasing cash flow! To give you some idea of the magnitude of this issue, one of our clients previously had over 35% of all its invoices queried by customers, resulting in a substantial amount of administration time and money being dedicated to resolving each case. The centralised portal allows customers to answer their queries as they occur; reducing time they spend questioning you.

Some companies consider this openness, transparency and visibility to be a potential threat to their profits and working practices. The most common statement tends to be along the lines of; “What if our worker includes details which we don’t want our customer to see?”. This is a valid and reasonable concern. Not all information which workers enter should necessarily be open to the customer. But rest assured, you can choose only the details you want to be visible to your customer, ensuring confidential or sensitive information remains just so.

But one word of advice, always ensure you’re offering more information than your competitor!

I shall leave you with this comment from our client, A-Plant, who has recently implemented a mobile data solution with the core aim of meeting SLAs which sums up how we have helped them achieve this :

“The combined capability of the mobility solution enables us to prove key performance indicators (KPIs) and meet the reporting procedures demanded by our key account customers.  We are able to demonstrate that we are meeting SLAs through accurate reporting on job type, the date and time it was completed, with electronic signature capture as proof of delivery or job completion.”