Computer Software Consultants SA (CSCSA), supplier of credit card and related terminals and software to more than 35 000 shops, restaurants and forecourts throughout SA, has implemented HEAT, the service management solution from FrontRange Solutions, to improve service delivery and management of service-level agreements (SLAs).
CSCSA provides service and support for almost 70 000 terminals on behalf of nine principals, among them Standard Bank - with which CSCSA has had a contract for 15 years.
"With most people using credit cards in places like restaurants and petrol station forecourts, a fault on a credit card machine represents not only an enormous loss of revenue to the business but distress and embarrassment to the card-holder," says Peter Edgar, CSCSA operations manager.
"So our 35 technicians around the country have to respond to calls from businesses as fast as possible - in spite of the considerable geographic spread of the customer businesses.
"Efficient scheduling of responses is therefore crucial, and because HEAT gives us the ability to SMS a technician in the field in real-time, a lot of duplicated travel time is reduced. A technician who is already busy in the George and Knysna area, for instance, can see immediately whether any other calls have come in for that area, and attend to them while he's there, instead of having to go back the next day - or even later in the same day.
"So HEAT saves us a lot of money by enabling us to address more jobs in less time - and spend less on travel costs. It's also boosting customer satisfaction and, because it automatically escalates delayed jobs and alerts us to potential delays, it enables us to be pro-active in customer service and keep a tight watch on our SLAs."
CSCSA chose HEAT from among a number of competitor products, "because it could give us a time-to-market of no more than three months," Edgar says.
"Building a similar program ourselves, which we had done once before, would have taken us three years. And other off-the-shelf products were much more difficult to implement than HEAT, had less functionality, and would have delayed us more than we were prepared to accept."
Some customisation of the basic product was necessary in order to accommodate CSCSA's unique definition of working hours (to include Saturdays and Sundays), and to support what is essentially a banking environment.
"But HEAT's flexibility made the adaptations easy. And it has enabled us to set up the system in such a way that it is specific enough to allow us to meet all Standard Bank's requirements, but generic enough for us to accommodate other customers in their own screens."
FrontRange Solutions product manager for Africa, Paul Bornhutter, says: "As information and communications technology (ICT) specialists themselves, CSCSA have both the insight and experience to take full advantage of every aspect of HEAT's very rich functionality - and get from it the precise benefits they were looking for. They're also able to exploit its scalability in order to make one system work for all their customers.
"In other words, they're using it as a performance improvement tool. That's an extraordinarily useful way to look at modern technology, because ICT these days is focused on process rather than features and functionality. It's a bit like electricity, in that the same power can be used to drive things as varied as washing machines, computers and street lights.
"Getting the best return on investment in your software, therefore, has more to do with your approach to it than the software's specific capabilities."
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