Innovative ‘threading’ technology improves speed and efficiency of communications with engineers

Phil Black - PII Editor 29/07/2014

207 3 minutes read

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Stephen Edwards, EMEA Project Manager, Agilent Technologies explains how deploying Boomerang™ solutions has improved speed and efficiency of communications with engineers working across Europe and India.

The Business

As the world’s premiere measuring company; Agilent Technologies supplies and supports measurement instrumentation, software and services for many organisations working across a wide range of industries. As well as being critical that the instruments work to the highest standards, accurate and timely work-force scheduling is essential to supporting the instruments.

The organisation, which is a spin-off of Hewlett-Packard Company and offers the broadest range of innovative measurement solutions, chose to use Boomerang™’s powerful messaging tools to manage complex daily communications between the back office and field engineers to ensure that all tasks are monitored and status’ are updated regularly.

The Boomerang™ tools use innovative patented ‘threading’ technology to bring automation into Agilent’s business processes, helping the organisation to maintain strong, responsive and traceable communications with field-based engineers.

The Challenge

Although Agilent already favoured SMS as its method of communication, the organisation had found that with the increasing size of its workforce, there were simply too many engineers to contact individually and manual database updates were also too complex to manage effectively and economically with the volume of messages that was being sent and received daily.

The company realised that Boomerang was the solution that it required due to its unique patented, dynamic, two-way, messaging technology.

The Solution

Boomerang’s technology enables any mobile device to integrate into Agilent’s business processes, using threaded messaging (email, SMS & Voice). This correlates multiple outbound messages with their associated inbound responses irrespective of the order in which they are answered.

This intelligent messaging technology allows Agilent to harness the mass medium of SMS to automate the management of workflow through database communication. With Boomerang, the company now has the ability to communicate with its field-based engineers across Europe and India, allowing engineers to update live database records via SMS, automatically triggering key actions.

Using Boomerang, engineers have the ability to offer a greater customer experience. They can schedule follow up calls the day after repairs are made by making use of Boomerang’s open SMS facility to respond to the specific job sent via SMS. They are able to do this multiple times in regards to the changing status of each project.

Boomerang is improving the speed and efficiency of communications to approximately 400 of Agilent’s engineers working across Europe. The innovative technology is helping eliminate human errors, save time and money whilst increasing visibility throughout the company.

The Benefits

Thanks to Boomerang’s technology Agilent has been able to save time and money from no longer having to manually send engineers SMS messages. This has in turn reduced the amount of calls being made to engineers due to the automated processes; freeing up staff time and increasing efficiency throughout the process.

With the use of Boomerang’s “open ticket” SMS feature, engineers can now provide immediate status updates on each job, creating real time visibility of the services provide to each customer and also the outcome of the task.

Using Boomerang technology, engineers automatically receive full customer details of site visits completed the previous day, enabling them to make follow-up calls whilst out in the field.

The software empowers the database with the ability to send pertinent SMS messages to each engineer and manage subsequent messages based on the engineers’ responses. Boomerang can then ensure that each SMS response is linked back to the unique database record, which then triggers the next database action based on the specific recipient’s reply. This means that each individual engineer receives the exact information required at precisely the time they need it; improving Agilent’s overall customer service.

Using Boomerang’s “open ticket” SMS functionality, a database is automatically updated with a live record. All staff can see the status of each project on a daily basis.

Stephen Edwards concludes, “Boomerang really was the only software that we could find in the market that uses unique “open ticket” SMS technology to manage all database updates and subsequent actions automatically.”