Efficient and effective after sales service is crucial to businesses — it helps build trust and customer loyalty. Especially in electronics, not only the reputation, but the survival of the company may depend on it.

For our client, a reputed and household name in the field of air conditioner service, unmatched customer service has been the cornerstone of their success. The client has been in the business for over three decades, starting out as a family business first and then growing consistently to become a big franchiser, with their presence in over six major cities in the country.

They pride themselves in being a multi brand air conditioner service company who are more trusted and reliable than most brand authorized service centers.

Though their air conditioner maintenance and repair work was impeccable, they felt the pressing need to transform their customer service experience with technology. Two of their competitors had upgraded their processes now offering convenience to their customers and technicians. Our clients didn't want to be left behind. Further, unlike their competitors, our client had franchisees who were depending on them for sustained business growth.

In today's competitive markets, no business can afford to be slow in adapting to change where enhaced customer experience is becoming the norm. The client reached out to Agile Soft Systems to build a robust solution not only for endurance of the age old business, but for future growth of the enterprise.

Business Problem

Our client had CRMs, customer relationship management softwares installed on each premise locally. The CRM stored customer contact details and the details of the service they had rendered to their clients in the past. Apart from this, most of the service management was still being done manually which involved a lot of paperwork. This led to several business problems.

Job Scheduling: Each outlet had service managers who had to manually schedule appointments on printed timesheets based on their technician availability, customer preferences, and urgency of the issue. Once the appointments were scheduled, service managers dispatched the responsible technicians to the specified locations with printed work orders. The printed work orders had to be manually updated by the technician on inspection at the site. These updates were communicated to the service managers via phone calls.

Inventory Management: Tracking and managing inventory of spare parts and equipment was done manually. Service managers had to keep track of stock levels, order new supplies, and ensure that technicians had the necessary tools and parts for each job. Discrepancies arose when the required spares were unavailable leading to delays in repairs. Few branches had invested individually on inventory management software to tackle the downtime they were facing.

Invoicing and Billing: The invoicing process was manual. It involved generating printed invoices that were mailed to customers, which led to potential errors and delays at times. The payments were made with cheques and cash mostly, and online transfers were accepted at some centers. Customer Communication: Customers had to be informed via phone calls about appointments, job completion, and delays if they were any. Customer follow ups were missed, though not frequently, which led to customer dissatisfaction.

Technician Inefficiency: New technicians did not have access to previous customer history, which hindered them from offering informed and personalized service to old customers. Service managers had to manually assign technicians to their respective sites based on their skill level, availability and proximity, which when not done correctly, led to work delays.

Overall disintegrated and disparate legacy systems, and business processes led to inefficiencies and delays in work and communication, resulting in customer and employee dissatisfaction.

Technological Inefficiencies

Separately installed legacy CRMs, and Invoicing and Accounting systems lacked the sophistication to handle the nature of the operations. Most of the scheduling was done manually on paper, and the apparent lack of clear information, led to feeble decision making at all levels of the business process. It affected the morale and work efficiency of business owners, service managers and technicians. Lack of ineffective communication systems further added to the problems.

Business owners did not have access to real-time data, and most franchisees submitted their business reports on a monthly or a bi-weekly basis to the parent company.

Solution

Agile Soft Systems, at the outset, understood they had to develop a Field Service Management Software with advanced capabilities for the client. But this organization, due to its traditional ownership cum franchisee model was complex. And a custom solution that benefited both parties — the parent business owners and franchisee owners — had to be designed.

Our team of architects and expert consultants conducted two separate workshops with the stakeholders: The first one was with experienced field managers and senior technicians. The second workshop was conducted with business and franchise owners.

Agile Soft System's team, a solutions architect, user experience designers, senior developers and operations staff collaborated with the stakeholders to create user stories in these workshops. We adopted Agile practices to deliver value at pace to our client.

Cloud Hosted Field Service Management Software:

The software needed to be accessed by the business owners, field managers, technicians, inventory and the accounting staff. Moreover, the application had to be scalable due to the seasonal nature of the service. There were services in the application that required real time data processing and communication as well.

Agile Soft Systems realized that a cloud hosted platform would be ideal to solve the business process problems at hand.

Microservices and DevOps

The modular nature of Microservices promotes flexibility and agility that allows developers to work on and deploy individual services independently. Maintenance and technical debt management becomes easier as developers can make changes and updates to individual services without the fear of disrupting the entire system. Microservices enabled us to work with different technologies for various services within the application.

Adopting DevOps practices such as continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), contributed to faster development cycles. Since, the team was developing the application in collaboration with the stakeholders, it was crucial to incorporate changes through continuous feedback and rapid iterations. This kind of agile development wouldn't have been possible if we hadn't adopted Microservices and DevOps.

ML and AI

Agile Soft Systems implemented Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to significantly enhance the capabilities of the field service management software. It helped us to optimize scheduling, route management and in demand forecasting.

The AI algorithms dynamically schedule and allocate technicians based on their location, skill level and urgency of the case. We implemented route optimization algorithms to plan most efficient routes for technicians considering factors like traffic, weather and multiple service appointments. This helped us minimize their travel time and fuel costs, while improving overall service delivery. The system also automatically assigns the right technician with the necessary expertise for each job.

With the help of historical data and ML algorithms, we can now predict demand for services in specific locations and seasons. It helps the business to allocate resources effectively, ensuring there are enough technicians to meet the demands during peak periods.

Mobile Solutions

Our team used React Native to develop mobile applications for Android and iOS to streamline processes and communication.

Our expert UX team have designed impeccable user journeys to help business owners, customers, fleet managers, and technicians to achieve their tasks with ease.

The fleet managers can access timesheets and schedule and assign jobs to technicians through their personal devices. Their job has been reduced to just monitoring in several areas such as resource allocation and route management, as these aspects have been taken over by AI. The managers can make adjustments and take over manually and over ride the system suggestions, in case it's required.

The technicians have access to customer history helping them to personalize the service, and take informed decisions without the need to escalate the matter to the managers. They can update the job card on site via their mobile devices and the adjustment reflects in the system in real time with necessary changes made to the master timesheet automatically. Inventory management has also become more efficient where a provision has been made to share inventory between closely located centers in case of spares shortages.

Important notifications regarding changes in the schedule and timesheet are sent to fleet managers and relevant technicians instantly.

Customers are presented with the details of the work almost instantly. The quote and invoices too are shared via a link that can be accessed on their mobile phones.

Payment Gateway integration

Agile Soft Systems seamlessly integrated two popular payment gateways to ensure timely transactions. Microservices has helped us model this aspect to successfully route payments to the respective business owners and franchisees.

Intelligent analytics and reporting system now gives business owners with the required information to take better business decisions.

Conclusion

The comprehensive solution offered by Agile Soft Systems not only addressed technological inefficiencies, but has also set the stage for enhanced customer experiences, improved employee satisfaction, and informed decision-making for business owners.

Our client's success story is a testament to the transformative power of technology for sustained growth and resilience in a competitive market.

Agile Soft Systems has helped businesses of various sizes to attain glorious heights by leveraging modern application development technologies and methodologies. Reach out to us to accelerate your transformative journey.