The gas fuel provider, which took on the new field service system to get greater efficiencies in the way it handles customer enquiries, is looking to meet ambitious business growth targets, and compete successfully against national providers such as British Gas.
 
Specifically designed to meet the heating company’s requirements, the system from Impact Applications, is said to have been shaped to make responses to customer enquiries and field engineer despatch as quick and efficient as possible.   According to the heating company, all contacts with customers are now recorded in a central system, from initial enquiry, through the sales process through ongoing service and on into system maintenance.

Northern Gas claims that the efficiencies within the system mean that the time from the initial enquiry to installation has been reduced by 20%, and sales capacity and productivity are said to have increased dramatically.

When asked about the role that the new field service system was playing at Northern Gas, Jim Lynch, the company’s marketing manager, explained that having the technology showed the rest of the industry that the firm is making very serious investments and looking to be taken very seriously by its competitors.

‘The role of our field service engineers is key to this, in that it closes the whole loop, and means we can control stock, we can control time, we can control money, and its all in a seamless system,’ he added.

However, Lynch did go on admit the system had seen some teething problems, though he was quick to add that these had now been resolved. ‘Initially we had some problems, but we’ve been working quite closely with Orange to download assorted patches to try to improve the connectivity issues,’ he told SM365.