SmartVillage and mobilejobcard

SMARTvillage (Pty) Ltd

The Challenge:

Smart Village is South Africa’s premier multi-play service provider and is a pioneer in its field, and the only company currently able to provide a truly converged multimedia and telecommunication services solution via a single access point to the residential and commercial sectors.

Smart Village has a very strong national footprint, with over a thousand homes and businesses already connected and serviced by its field technicians.

Smart Village technicians previously had to call in to the office, either physically or via a cellular phone voice-call, each morning to collect their allocated service jobs for the day. Tasked with these service jobs, originated from the Smart Village in-house developed Call Centre, the technicians would head off into the field to call on the clients in order to repair and service installed hardware equipment, returning later in the day with the completed paper-based job cards. Once the job card had been returned to the office the data would manually be captured into the backend system and processed for invoicing using Pastel Evolution.

The Solution:

Using Mobile Gateway Solution’s Integr8or™ Mobile Application Server and the latest version of mobilejobcard™ on a colour-screen, internet-enabled cellular phone the field engineer requests electronic job cards from Smart Village’s Call Centre simply by selecting the button marked ‘New Jobs’. Only jobs allocated to that specific technician are downloaded to mobilejobcard thus eliminating the need for the technician to spend valuable time in the morning traffic arriving at the office to collect his jobs for the day.

The field engineer now completes the assigned job allocating the parts used for the job, actions taken, kilometres traveled and the time taken to complete the job. Once completed the engineer and client sign off the job, either by means of a digital signature or pre-allocated PIN, in pre-defined fields on the device’s screen before uploading the completed job back to the Call Centre for processing, thereby eliminating the need for additional data capturing. Once the job has been signed off as completed by the Call Centre the data is automatically passed on to Pastel Evolution for invoicing, eliminating yet another data capturing process.

All job cards are stored in the database in PDF-format, accessible from the call centre interface, for reference purposes.

The Benefits:

The cost of a service call is reduced as a result of:

The reduction of cell phone calls to and from the Smart Village Call Centre.
The need for the field engineer to travel unnecessarily to the office to collect or drop off any job cards.
A significant reduction in data-capture errors resulting from multiple re-entries of the data, i.e. better data integrity.
Better management of the field engineers. Should a client call in to the Call Centre and request the services of Smart Village the closest field engineer can then easily be assigned to fulfill the service call.
The Call Centre staff are now free to do other administration and service support tasks further improving the image of Smart Village as a service orientated organization.
The image of Smart Village is enhanced as field engineers look far more professional to the clients.
The solution allows for one point of accountability, a more streamlined business process with the benefits of higher productivity both in front of the customer and in the back office.
Smart Village also benefit from a mobile solution without the risk of sensitive data being stored on mobile devices out of the office.

Conclusion:

mobilejobcard offers a mobile solution providing a more streamlined, simple, secure and accurate business process adding value to the field and administration staff activities of Smart Village. It further adds enhanced value to the Smart Village client base, by providing them with a more efficient service.