Self-service reservation in the fieldforce

Abstract

On-line service reservation is becoming increasingly popular in the service industry. As services become more complex, requiring co-ordination among individual actions, the planning for making service appointments is normally conducted manually by the operators, often resulting in slow responses to customers.To tackle this problem, we have developed a real-time service reservation portal that takes an order from a user and works out appointment options, based on the availability of enterprise resources, for the user to book on-line. The portal is capable of dealing with complex workflow appointing, supporting interactive fine-tuning in individual appointments, respecting customer preferences and work policies, monitoring progress of workflow, informing the customer of status changes in job scheduling, dispatching and execution, as well as handling exceptions automatically.We have integrated the portal, code-named FieldReserve, with other components in the BT fieldforce optimisation suite (FOS) that covers functions of resource planning, scheduling and execution for the fieldforce to demonstrate the feasibility and potential benefits of this technology. Benefits demonstrated are to provide customers with instant response of service reservation, to provide volume control on reservation, to break away from one-size-fits-all lead times for service fulfilment, to provide customers with equal access to service provision, and to bring transparency of service progress to customers. Currently, we are actively engaging with businesses and have obtained strong support to downstream the key values of this technology in commercial contexts.

From trips to telcos — next generation service portals

“…The techniques used to perform scheduling with respect to appointing and resource availability are detailed in the paper by Li et al [6]. Execution of the process is handled in the Kreno framework by a 'home brew' workflow engine; however, processes are written in BPEL4WS (a standard business processes description language) which enables them to be executed by standard enterprise workflow engines from companies such as BEA, Microsoft and IBM, and we expect that in almost all applications this is the method of execution that will be chosen.…”

FOS: An Advanced Planning and Scheduling Suite for Service Operations

“…am and pm) and these slots become available to allocate to incoming requests from the company's CRM system or online ordering systems. In contrast to queuing, the customer is allocated a date and time when an activity will be performed or a more complex order requiring more than activities will be completed [14]. Cancellations/alterations are also supported.…”

Six steps to excellent customer service

“…By keeping a detailed database showing which engineers are working, the skills that they have, and their geographical location (if relevant), the most appropriate person can be found to work on the customer's problem. A sophisticated work allocation system has been developed within BT in order to do this, which is the subject of a paper by Li [2].…”