Joint Venture Pump Services, a black empowerment company formed a year ago to maintain all petrol pumps at BP service stations around the country, has implemented HEAT, the customer service management solution from FrontRange Solutions, to gain better control of its day to day activities and, thereby, ensure meeting its service level agreements.
Says Joint Venture Pump Services CEO, Brenton Thomas: "Unlike the manual systems we had in place before - which had no automatic alert or analytical reporting capabilities - HEAT continuously and intelligently updates us on the status of all calls. So it enables us to pre-empt service delays by managing our technicians much more effectively. And, because we can track trends on pumps and service stations, we can schedule regular maintenance programmes more appropriately.
"In addition, giving our customers feedback is easy because we have comprehensive information available at the click of a button."
Twenty-eight permanent Joint Venture Pump Service technicians operating in all nine provinces and working on the instructions of a five-man help-desk attend to an average of 1 800 calls a month.
The company having grown since signing its kick-start three-year contract with BP South Africa (BPSA) in early 2005, the calls cover 658 BP petrol stations as well as pumps owned by other companies, including Masana Petroleum Solutions - which has taken over BPSA`s commercial division servicing, among others, the mining, manufacturing, industrial, transport, construction and public sectors.
"We`ve actually taken our service levels beyond those initially required of us by our customers - who were really only looking for a co-ordinated maintenance capability," Thomas says. "In fact, to do the job properly - to ensure that petrol stations don`t have pumps down during peak sales periods or that entire factories don`t grind to a halt because they can`t pump fuel - you need fully automated call centre functionality. That`s why we opted for HEAT."
Referred to HEAT by Intaba Technologies, a black empowerment company that provides forecourt and retail information technology (IT) to the petrochemical industry, Joint Venture Pump Services also checked the suitability of competitor solutions.
"In the end, we chose HEAT because it had the functionality we were looking for at a competitive price," says Thomas.
"In fact, HEAT was a quick win for Joint Venture Pump Services," says David Lees of e2e, Joint Venture Pump Services` implementation partner. "The core software is so adaptable that it took us only two weeks to configure it specifically for the BPSA service level agreements and then import the spreadsheet data. User training took only a couple of hours.
"That`s the beauty of HEAT. You can resolve a client`s specific pain point very quickly and affordably. And once the system is in, you have a depth of functionality to call on to help your client continuously improve performance."
Thomas says Joint Venture Pump Services will indeed be using more HEAT functionality than originally planned - in order to enhance its service offering. "As a matter of course, our technicians collect a great deal of information about a service station`s pump equipment. We can use that information in HEAT to provide an asset tracking and management service to our customers.
"Also, because HEAT is so easy to configure, we can operate different service level agreements for different customers, thereby enabling us to continuously expand our customer base.
"In other words, HEAT has already made us more productive and now it`s going to help us grow."
FrontRange Solutions (SA) managing director, Tracey Newman agrees. "All FrontRange solutions are designed to eliminate barriers to growth - by giving organisations a wealth of options and, therefore, creating business opportunities they wouldn`t otherwise have had the means to pursue."
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