Sierra Support Services company increases productivity by 12% with Telogis

Dublin-based Sierra (www.sierra.ie) has 30 years’ experience in providing support services to blue chip clients including UPC, ESB, Sky, Scottish Power, Irish Water and many public sector organisations. It delivers a full end-to-end project management service that covers all aspects - from recruitment to training, deployment, field force management, health, safety, back office and call centre support.

The company has a reputation for delivering quality support services in Ireland, the UK and internationally and has recently invested in the Telogis platform to manage customer service operations that it provides on behalf of major telecommunications companies in Ireland. Using Telogis Fleet to manage its customer equipment collection service Sierra has seen significant productivity gains in its van fleet operations.

Glen McGarry, Equipment Collections Manager at Sierra explained: “We have been using Telogis Route for just a year and have already achieved a 12% increase in productivity in our fleet out on the road. Each van typically carries out between 40 and 60 calls a day, which takes a lot of planning to ensure the best route and use of time. We wanted to take the thinking off the drivers’ shoulders and free them to concentrate on making their calls and servicing customers and now use Telogis Route to plan their days.”

Mr McGarry selected the Telogis platform from other cloud-based solutions for its openness and flexibility; “Telogis really showed that they were listening to us to meet our needs, they supported us through the trial and helped us to use the solution the way that we needed it to run for our business.”

Efficient route planning increases productivity

The team at Sierra has a consistent quota of around 12,000 jobs that need to be scheduled – where agents visit customer premises to collect equipment that is no longer required. They plan that between 800 and 900 of the visits are completed daily by a team of 12 -14 people, depending upon availability.

Mr McGarry uses the Telogis Route Planning Suite to plan each driver’s day within a certain geographical footprint. He claims significant business benefits through hours saved daily as a result of efficient planning. “We have seen an increase in productivity in the back office as well as the drivers’ route plans. We used to manually plan the jobs for the following day, which could take up to three hours but now takes less than an hour. Plus our team on the road are making more calls through better route planning and spending less time working on their routes the morning before setting off.”

The Telogis Fleet application is used by Glen McGarry to monitor activity across the company’s vehicles, ensuring that drivers stick to planned routes and there is no deviation. This enables him to check productivity against planned activity and can help pinpoint exactly where drivers are, down to street-level accuracy. Collecting this information is also useful when reporting back to the client with performance metrics.

Improving service by keeping customers informed

The next phase for the Sierra team is to use Telogis Progression for real-time job creation, tracking (estimated time of arrival and completion) and routing, including pre-planned routes and dynamic changes throughout the day.

Currently the team offers three time slots to call in a day. However, the nature of the work is such that customers are not motivated to wait in for the driver to call and collect equipment and so if there is a delay due to traffic or breakdown, then the driver may miss the calling slot allocated.

Mr McGarry’s goal for Telogis Progression is that it will enable the team to work to more specific customer appointments within tighter time slots, notifying in advance if there are any deviations or delays. This will improve customer service and improve productivity by reducing the number of wasted calls.

“At the moment about 25% of the teams’ work is on set appointments and we have about 85% success in achieving these. I am confident that using Telogis Progression we will see this increase as we will be able to manage and complete appointment times more tightly, letting the customer know of changes.”

Glen McGarry is also planning to use the reporting feature to provide feedback for clients. Statistics from the reports will be able to demonstrate how many times an agent has called on a particular customer and on which days, which will be useful performance data for Sierra’s clients.

“We will have information that we can draw upon to help service our customers better. Using the Telogis platform we can capture the right detail and data and identify how best to approach our workload to ensure optimum efficiency on behalf of our client.”

Image above: Sierra Support Services has been involved in some of the largest and most complex utility projects undertaken in the British Isles over recent years and employs approx. 1600 people throughout the UK and Ireland

Source: Telogis (www.telogis.com)