NRG, which owns the brands Nashuatec, Rex-Rotary, and Gestetner, has called on mobile field service communications specialist Dexterra to supply its platform and application for the service provider’s communications with its 2,500 field engineers across Europe.   It will start to be rolled out to 300 field service engineers in the UK shortly and this will be followed by the Benelux region. It is planned to be fully implemented across Europe within three years.

The mobile application is part of a major customer relationship management (CRM) project (called SMART) to harmonise NRG’s service management right across Europe.  It started in 2001 with the establishment of a service contact centre and followed in 2002 by the purchase of software from Siebel and a scheduling solution from Clicksoftware. 

One of the key targets of the current initiative in the UK is to turn the value of the engineers’ contact with customers into business.  Paul Rouse, the group business process re-engineering manager - service at NRG Group, said: ‘We realised that our engineers have as many as four times as many contacts with customers than the rest of the company put together and we wanted to leverage them.’ 

He added that the engineers were also going through a ‘change management exercise’ as the company looked for them to capture possible sales opportunities.  ‘We are not looking to turn our engineers into sales people but to keep them up to date with opportunities for customers they are already visiting and to add value to the process,’ he said.  ‘We have tried this in Benelux and it outstripped our expectations.’

He said engineers will also be able to access information such as parts, products, customer information, technical white papers and troubleshooting, from the field.  ‘But probably the biggest single change they will see is moving from manual to automated scheduling,’ he added.

Dexterra has been brought in to replace the incumbent supplier, Idesta Solutions. ‘They wanted to change their way to market and provide a managed solution where they handled all our communications through their hosted system and that is not the way we wanted to go.’  He added that one of the advantages of working with Dexterra was its system allowed the group to be flexible in its policy for using PDAs or handheld computers.  ‘The handheld option may prove particularly important in supporting walking engineers based in city centres,’ he said.

‘Dexterra stood out from the competition not only in its support of multiple devices, but through its ability to easily integrate with existing systems, and its clear appreciation of our business requirements,’ said Rouse ‘As well as being able to demonstrate a good understanding of the workflow of a field service engineer, Dexterra gave us impressive examples of the solution working in practice. Although we have a way to go until the project is complete, we already have a great working relationship and have been very impressed with the flexibility and support from the Dexterra team.’