Tags Bottom Line, Innovation, Communication

Back to school

So you've got a cutting-edge niche product that's in high seasonal demand. Keeping up with that demand without hiring excess staff is a problem. What's the best way forward? Derrick Walton of Promethean offers some hard lessons.

There’s something strangely comforting about a blackboard. The endless chalk dust, the hours spent staring at them in a classroom, even nails being scraped across them can evoke fond memories of our childhood.

But, like pretty much everything else, the old blackboard's days are numbered. It's being replaced with a newer, younger, electronic model – in the form of an "interactive whiteboard".

Increasing numbers of teachers are coming back from summer break to find their classrooms have been fitted with these whiteboards, displaying material from PCs and allowing teachers and pupils to write on them with the aid of special pens. While classrooms fill up with PCs, it only makes sense for classroom trappings to keep up to date, and the technology has proved very popular. Over the past few years, the proportion of schools that has installed interactive whiteboards has gone from 13 per cent to 86 per cent among primary schools and from 40 per cent to 97 per cent among secondary schools.

All of which is good news for leading UK-headquartered interactive whiteboard maker Promethean, but until recently a mixed blessing for the company's support staff, who spend the autumn months fielding an avalanche of enquiries from teachers, IT specialists and the company's global chain of resellers (Promethean distributes its products in some 70 countries).

And even though the number of service and support calls represents a smaller proportion of the total systems in use than was the case when the technology was brand new, there are still plenty of calls to cope with.

Interactive whiteboards are now such a key part of classroom practice that schools are keen to have as little downtime as possible. However, troubleshooting can be difficult because service engineers must field calls made by teachers out of the classroom and away from the equipment that they are having trouble with.

In addition, a stream of new products, such as Promethean's Activote technology (an integrated personal response system enabling each pupil to "have a voice") and Activboard +2 (a whiteboard on a height-adjustable stand with a special super short-throw projector one metre away from the board), ensures customers keep coming back for help and advice.

Of the 50,000 calls received each year by Promethean's UK Customer Support staff, over 6,500 flood in during September: "It's a seasonal business," explains Derrick Walton, Promethean's global head of customer quality services. "September is a spike that always affects our business. In the summer holidays, schools want to sort out their classrooms, so our installation teams are extremely busy. Then when the schools re-open, teachers get in touch with their questions."

Facilities for providing information and advice to customers via Promethean's knowledge base has helped meet demand, especially in allowing teachers to make queries out of school hours (Saturday morning is one popular time for online queries).

But answering telephone enquiries was no easy matter for staff manning the phones. Although Promethean had invested in a call distribution system to speed up call centre response times, agents lacked easily available call histories and customer data.

The company operated two ageing contact management applications – for sales and after-sales service and support – which imposed restrictions on the number of people who could use them and on the size of the database they could support.

On the services side there were several different applications relying on a mixture of Excel and Access databases. Call details were written down as customers rang in and were passed by email to engineers who would re-key the information. Promethean did not keep schedules for engineers on computer at all but drew them up using the T-card system, which involves filling out T-shaped cards that are moved about on a slotted metal board.

"If you look at a successful business, you can cope with these inefficiencies for a period of time, but when you're growing quickly – from 3,000 systems sold per year to our current rate of 50,000 – it wasn't sustainable," admits Walton. "If we hadn't made the decision we would have suffered badly. It was imperative that we reduce the need for telephone and email contact internally between staff."

Keeping up with demand without hiring excess staff proved impossible and bringing in lots of temporary staff wasn’t straightforward either, since the products are technology-based and quality control concerns are always going to be an issue.

Promethean concluded that its lack of up-to-date customer relationship management systems was in danger of holding back the company's ambitious plans to double its £69m annual turnover within the next three years.

The company decided to install Kudos service management software from Frontline Consultancy, built using IBM's Domino software and running on the company's x-Series platform. The Kudos package, which recently won a Beacon award for best industry solution from IBM, provides service helpdesk management, service level agreement management, schedule optimisation, loan and rental management, workshop management and enterprise customer relationship management.

"One of the greatest challenges in implementing Kudos at Promethean was dealing with the rapid growth the customer was experiencing, and being able to scale it appropriately without compromising performance and functionality," says Andrew Dewhurst, director of Frontline Consultancy. "The system also had to reflect the changes in business practices needed by the fast-changing climate."

"Last year was the first time we didn't take on extra staff during September," says Walton. "Now a call is entered only once. The guys on the front desk just press a button and all the details go to the field engineers. In the past, our reaction time was longer and our ability to deal with the annual surge was compromised."

With the Kudos system, Promethean says it has doubled the efficiency of its field engineers, allowing them to deal with twice the number of enquiries, and halved the time it takes for the company to ship loan equipment to replace broken systems while they are being repaired.

Loan equipment can now be shipped within a couple of hours, providing a much better level of service to customers.

The system has provided Promethean with better visibility of quotes and correspondence. It has also provided better records of what has happened since a customer first called in. If calls need to be passed on to a higher level in the organisation, managers can look back at a customer's history and make better informed decisions.

"We now have an integrated and coherent system. Data is shared between sales and service, and scheduling can be proactively managed," Walton concludes.

For more information, contact Frontline Consultancy

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