SaaS Featured Article

Today's news is datelined "Cleveland and Madrid," and when's the last time you saw those two cities mentioned in the same breath?

 

Cleveland's Toa Technologies, a Customer Appointment Management vendor, and Ono, a Spanish broadband communications provider, deployed Toa's SaaS (News - Alert) product for managing field operations.

 

Toa will allow Ono to give both customers and technicians control in managing the in-home appointment, said Manuel Marti, director of customer operations at Ono.

 

With competition among broadband companies intensifying throughout Europe, service providers are looking for ways to cut costs without damaging customer service. Legacy workforce management tools are generally ill-suited for achieving these goals because they're designed to support technician work processes rather than customer preferences.

 

Toa's Customer Appointment Management product combines mobile workforce management technology, predictive intelligence and interactive customer communications, company officials say. This lets service providers accurately identify the technician's time of arrival (Toa, get it?) at the customer's home and narrow the customer's wait window from the usual 4 to 8 hours down to "60 minutes or less," Toa officials claim.

 

Almost exactly a year ago, Toa announced that Cox (News - Alert) Communications selected Toa's software service, ETAdirect, to manage its entire contracted technician workforce.

 

"We chose TOA Technologies' (News - Alert) solution because it integrates with our existing CRM applications and provides a unified, enterprise-wide view of our nationwide network of installation contractors," said Mark Leuenberger, Cox's Director of Field Service Technology."

 

Ono has deployed Toa's flagship SaaS Appointment Management System to support communications between Ono, field technicians and customers. The system sets up service appointments, identifies customer preferences for appointment times and communication vehicles (e-mail, SMS or phone call) and allows both customers and technicians to respond to real-time events.

 

Ono officials say they want to eliminate missed customer appointments or no-shows, increase the number of appointments technicians are completing and find other system and satisfaction improvements to cut costs.

 

Ono currently provides TV, Internet and telephone services to more than 1.86 million residential and business customers across Spain. On average, Ono's 2,000 mobile technicians schedule about 8,000 appointments per day.

 

Recently named by Gartner (News - Alert) a "Cool Vendor" in CRM, Toa has offices in the Netherlands.