For any given day an estimate is made of how many slots will be made available in each geographic area. Suppose that work takes one hour on average, travel time is one hour, and there are ten workers in each geographic area. Assuming an eight hour work day, that means there are forty appointments available on any given day (each appointment takes two hours, one to do the work, and one for travel time, so four per day).

In the bucket scheme work is assigned to each bucket until it’s full. On the day of service a manager has to match up the individual technicians who are available with the work that’s been assigned to the bucket. In my posting on ROI on Automated Scheduling I’ve written about how expensive the “day of” scheduling is.

One challenge of bucket scheduling is that you cannot confirm a fixed time when someone will show up for a customer. Often the best that can be done is morning or afternoon. Real time scheduling solutions like ours schedules each individual technician at the time that an order is booked. This means that customers can be given a fixed date and time when someone will show up to do service work providing a better customer experience.

While the advantages of real time scheduling can be demonstrated, many service organizations find it challenging to move from bucket scheduling to real time scheduling. In order to do real time scheduling, the schedules of each individual technician must be established ahead of time.  This requires more planning and a change to the business processes of the organization. Changing business processes requires people to think in new ways. 

Our scheduling platform is designed to adapt to an organizations existing workflow, but we still have to help our prospects make the leap from letting people schedule the individual technicians to letting software do it automatically. The benefits of real time scheduling have been demonstrated in the marketplace. Rather than use buckets for scheduling, I’d prefer to use them for a fun day at the beach.

David Greer

We live among the coastal mountains of the west coast of Canada. I was recently hiking in the mountains around a small lake. The stillness of the water and the beauty of the mountains reminded me that organizational change is more like a raging river than a calm lake.

Books have been written on organization change and business process improvement. Change involves people and changing people’s behavior can be arduous. Keys that we’ve identified for successful business process change are:

1. The business benefit to the enterprise has to be clearly articulated to everyone involved.
2. Leadership. For our scheduling application, we are always working with a senior business leader along with a senior IT person. They provide the leadership to implement our scheduling solution across the affected business units. Equally important, they can communicate the changes and the business benefit.
3. Continuously improve your business processes. This is ongoing and not a one time event.

Getting people to change the way they do things will always be a challenge. Competitors, changing market conditions, and technological advances are forcing all of us to change our business processes. We all need to find ways to rise to the leadership challenge to see the necessary business process improvements through to the end.

David Greer

Historically, software applications were written with few if any open interfaces. These systems were huge, monolithic, and difficult to interface to. The challenge is that these legacy systems contain business logic that implements key decisions about business processes.  Without an easy set of interfaces, these highly valuable units of business logic are locked away, difficult to reuse, and costly to maintain.

The concept of SOA was introduced so that those involved in business processes and information technology could design software and business rules as a service. The goal was to make it much easier for companies to reuse software and to interface to SOA applications.

This was helped along by development platforms, like Microsoft’s .NET or Java’s J2EE, which make it easier to both create SOA applications and to interface to an SOA software implementation.  We estimate that it takes 50-75% less implementation work (measured as hours of work) to integrate our scheduling platform into a customer’s IT infrastructure then with comparable non-SOA scheduling solutions.  We achieve these cost savings, even if the customer’s infrastructure is based on legacy mainframe or UNIX platforms.

By being a SOA web service, we also provide customers with leverage to solve multiple business problems. Customers typically purchase and deploy one of our scheduling solutions for a particular business problem such as automating the people and workflow in telecommunication service activations.  This only involves a percentage of all of the employees in the organization. If there are scheduling challenges with another section of the business, our implementation can be used to solve those challenges with a small amount of incremental work.  Traditional business applications can sometimes be applied to new business problems, but rarely can they do so with little work effort.

When SOA is well done it brings greatly reduced integration costs and higher reusability of business logic and application solutions.  That’s why you could care about Service Oriented Architectures.

David Greer

Cartoon courtesy of Geek and Poke

- the perception is price
- the reality is service

You lost a customer.  Why?  
The answer may surprise you.

According to a survey by Marketing Sherpa, vendors think that customers primarily leave because of price. However that same survey shows that the primary reason customers leave a vendor is due to Customer Service.

Customers and Vendors Disagree:

Source: Marketing Sherpa

The disparity underscores an essential point in this age of commoditization: superior customer service can bolster loyalty and provide a basis to charging a price premium.

Customer service is rapidly becoming the primary differentiator for organizations competing for marketplace success. Customers have increasing expectations of extraordinary service from their vendors and suppliers. Service differentiation is increasingly difficult when everyone is chanting “We are driven by customer service”. Customer loyalty is key and every call a customer makes is another opportunity to either impress them or lose them to a competitor. Driving their expectations is a convenience centered economy where consumers are highly valued and unaccustomed to waiting for answers.

Real time scheduling of customer service with firm dates and times is now expected as part of good customer service. This is easy to do when running a small dental practice, but very difficult to achieve in large global enterprises where thousands of people and resources must be coordinated. Advanced real time workforce scheduling platforms like those provided by eOptimize are designed to be integrated into larger enterprises and existing systems that can provide the tools to allow you to take customer service to the next level.

It’s easy for the sales person to say we lost the customer because of price. It’s hard for an organization to see that they are really losing customers because of poor customer service. Don’t let your existing systems and processes hold you back. There are solutions available today to enable the best in customer service scheduling. See our white paper Real Time Scheduling in Workforce Management to learn about the advantages of real time workforce scheduling over traditional scheduling.

Gary Yurkovich

For each managed service, all of the constituent parts must be understood.  The customer doesn’t care if the network is working fine, but the email server is down and they can’t access their email.  There needs to be a shift in thinking so that the people supplying the service understand service delivery from the customer’s point of view.

This is a big change.  Traditionally, individuals are responsible for keeping individual pieces of equipment running.  Today there needs to be people and systems that can see the entire ecosystem for delivering a service.  New quality of service and key productivity indicators need to be created and monitored for all parts of service deliver. Equally important the interaction of those parts has to be measured. One or two missing pieces of the puzzle mean that the customer isn’t getting the service that was promised.

The TM Forum’s Service Framework calls each sub-service a service component. Individual service components need to be managed as they form the building blocks of the entire service being delivered to the customer (just as pieces of a puzzle join together to make a complete picture).  In some cases, individual sub-services may be provided by third-parties.  It’s critical that each component be indentified and the organization responsible for the components delivery need to be managed.

As a modern web service, it’s easy to make our scheduling platform be a component in the service offering.  Whether it’s invoked via a web browser where customers do self-scheduling or by a manager reacting to a service outage, we’re there to schedule the people that keep all the services running.

David Greer

When working with customers we find that there is continuous interaction between CRM and scheduling.  For example, when companies have a workflow that needs to be executed for every new customer, schedules have to be created.  In cases where people need to be scheduled in a coordinated workflow, providing scheduling answers is hard. 

For example, suppose that these steps have to be executed before a new customer can be setup:

1. One hour introductory meeting with an implementer.
2. After the introductory meeting, a project manager has to spend a half hour creating the project plan for the customer.
3. The account manager has to be scheduled to do a follow up call after the project manager has the plan.

In many companies this scheduling problem is solved by manual processes and numerous email messages back and forth between teams and the customer.  It is prone to all sorts of errors.  By automating this scheduling the customer experience completely changes:

1. They get the scheduling answers they need when they place their order.
2. Things are delivered when they said they would be.

This level of customer delivery is what people expect today.  Is your company making it easy and accurate for your customer’s first customer relationship with you to be an outstanding one?  With automated people and resource scheduling, you can.

David Greer

1. Reengineer your products and processes so that customers never need to contact you in the first place.
2. Create self-service mechanisms (they suggest Web and IVR) with high success rates.
3. It’s much cheaper to be proactive rather than reactive.  If there’s a problem, tell the customer about it before they contact you.
4. Make it easy to contact you (e.g., web sites make contact information prominent and accessible).
5. The entire company has to “own” the problem.  Customer problems are rarely the result of customer service, but rather the result of poor design or execution by many parts of the organization.
6. Listen to the customer and communicate with them from their point of view.
7. Measure great customer experience by focusing on metrics such as number of contacts per order.

In my early days at Robelle Solutions Technology, we tripled the number of customers without increasing staff.  As a software company, we spent a tremendous amount of time reengineering our products to eliminate technical support calls.  A lot of that effort went into the installation of the software.  Many software companies figure you’re only going to install a software product once, so why put a lot of effort into the installer.  The truth is that the installation process is often one of the earliest customer experiences.  Having to call technical support to get a software product installed, even if technical support is excellent, is not the best way to make a first impression.

At eOptimize, we similarly put a lot of engineering effort into both our installer and our product to eliminate technical support calls.  Our software runs in highly complex environments and interacts deeply with Microsoft Windows, Active Directory Services, and Exchange.  These are challenging products to work with in all of their combinations, but we rise to that challenge to both reduce our support costs and to insure that our customers have a great first experience.

Last week, I wrote about how automated scheduling can save your customers a lot of time by self-service scheduling via a web portal.  Our customers and their customers can save people years of time by letting our scheduling engine automate scheduling of customer appointments, exactly as Bill and David advocate in their second step. If you are passionate about customer service, I highly recommend “The Best Service Is No Service”.

David Greer

When dealing with Fortune 500 clients, we are amazed at the staggering amount of lost time that organizations cost their customers.  We know of a large financial services company that manually schedules time for their financial advisors to provide education to the employees of their corporate clients.  For just one of their corporate clients, the call center took 17,500 calls to schedule an appointment with an advisor in 2007.  The average length of each call was 12 minutes.  That works out to 438 days.  If we assume approximately 200 working days a year, that’s more than two people’s full-time effort for a year.

Imagine what the client of our financial services firm would feel about wasting two people-years worth of their employees’ time just to schedule appointments with an advisor. With our software, the employees of the corporate client could self-schedule their appointments through a customer web portal.  Since we provide solutions in seconds, employees could schedule themselves in under a minute (even with login time and multiple choices for dates and times). If I was one of those employees, I’d like to have that time back so that I could spend more time on the beach with my family.

David Greer

Many telecommunication and utility companies use the concept of bucket or slot scheduling.  They allocate so many “buckets” or “time slots” in each geographic region.  Work orders are assigned to each “bucket” or “time slot” until it is full for a given day.  It is common for the time period to be a half day, thus customers can only be told that someone will show up in the morning or the afternoon.

Ignoring the lack of customer service in this approach, consider what happens each day.  Every morning the manager in each region has to do the final scheduling, assigning the work from each “bucket” or “time slot” to individual technicians. A mid-sized telecommunications company with offices throughout the US might have a thousand field service technicians and back office engineers who have to be scheduled every day.  If we assume twenty people being scheduled per manager, there would be fifty managers.  If they each take twenty minutes to do the scheduling, that’s 2,500 minutes or almost 42 hours of management time per day.

While automated scheduling will not eliminate all this management time, it can eliminate 70-80% of it.  Because each individual technician is scheduled ahead of time, managers can focus on exceptions.  These range from someone calling in sick to emergency break and repair issues.  The net result is management being more focused on customer service and less on day-to-day operations.  As a bonus, customers are told a precise time when a technician will show up, rather than having to wait around for an entire morning or afternoon.  Automated scheduling let’s you go with the wind, giving you and your customers a smooth ride to scheduling answers.

David Greer

While the analogy is a stretch, our scheduling engine is the core platform that let’s people perform on time.  Like “The Little Engine That Could”, our scheduling platform has the intelligence and scale to always get over the mountain of complex scheduling problems.

Rather than pull from the front of the train, we sit in the middle of all important IT systems, coordinating the complex information that let’s us automate individual schedules and workflow.  James Taylor at Smart (enough) Systems calls us an Enterprise Decision Management system. EDMs operate in real-time to make operational decisions for organizations from moment to moment.  The advantage of EDMs is that they are operating on up-to-date information, resulting in faster and better decisions.

In many organizations information silos make it difficult to automate decisions such as people’s schedules.  Calendar information is stored in MS Exchange.  For telecommunication companies, customer information is in their OSS or BSS. Provisioning inventory might be in another application.  Individual skills for engineers are in the HR database.  Because we are a service oriented architecture (SOA) web service, we can sit in between all of these applications.  By combining all of the data, we are able to make intelligent scheduling decisions faster and better than human beings can.

If a financial services call center is taking calls to book appointments for advisors to make customer visits across the US, we again have to deal with multiple information silos.  The customer application has the address, information we can use to compute travel times, physical location, and time zones.  Each advisor is licensed to operate in specific states, so the HR database needs to be interrogated to verify license information.  Individual calendars are stored in MS Exchange.  No individual call center person can keep all the variables straight in their head.  If there’s no automated solution, our experience is that there is an entire team of managers who take every request and then manually match all the information to find scheduling solutions.  Not only is this labor intensive, there are so many manual steps that it is error prone.

At eOptimize we have the enterprise decision management platform that can scale to take all these complex information silos and produce correct scheduling answers in real-time.  Our scheduling engine solves your people and resource scheduling challenges, just like “The Little Engine That Could.”

David Greer