Customer Care System

Customer Care System
Taking care of Customers for large, mid-sized and small companies

The Customer Care System is an online application including Rate Sheets, Quotations, Orders, Scheduling, and Invoices. Create professional quality bids, turn bids into Orders, schedule your people and equipment to service the Order – all in one, easy-to-use system. Customer Care organizes the information you need so the flow from pre-sales, to Sales, to Operations, to strategic planning runs smoothly and efficiently.

Setup takes just a few minutes per employee, then your employees login into a secure web site to begin work. There is nothing to install. We handle the server hardware, software and backups. Use our standard templates, or customize and use your own.

Collins Software gives you a turn-key system. We provide the internet servers, software and training. Your managers and schedulers track service delivery. Your Sales creates professional quality bids. Your service staff gets the job done – with a minimum of surprises and mistakes. No specialized hardware to buy, no software to install, no IT staff on overhead.

If you are currently trying to maintain systems in-house, or working with a mix of manual and automated tools to manage your operations, then consider operating through a secure server on the internet. We deal with the hardware and software – you go about what you do best – caring for your customers, providing your clients with the best possible service.

Have you been frustrated by communication failures that waste your time and money? Did you schedule people and equipment, then find they were already booked? Have your customers tried to contact you to tell you about scheduling changes, or to ask about project status – only to be faced with unanswered phones and frustration? Do you have an online system so they can easily and professionally communicate with you? We offer a web-based solution that is available to you and your customers 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

Our web-based Customer Care System solves costly communication problems that happen too often in complex service operations by managing the job details for everybody directly involved with the Customer. Are your business units not talking to each other? Or using manual and haphazard tools to talk to each other. Move to a system which integrates all parts of your business – an integrated system so you can run an efficient and professional service company.

Our target market is service-oriented businesses - Plumbing, Electrical, Contractors, Catering, Maintenance, Utility Companies, municipalities - companies that do a lot of bidding and perform service work.

Where did the Customer Care System come from? Collins Software has been creating software for several decades.

Mid-size Company System – 100 to 200 employees to be scheduled. Three or four people full time handling the scheduling and management. Most likely going to be distributed geographically – you need distributed processing (an internet architecture) so there is a real need for Customer Care System – which is web based to begin with. Each geographic area or office can work independently. You get custom views of your operation, yet can see the entire organization. Managers and owners can see the whole picture. Backup and recovery becomes more important, so we provide an option to have a physically separate backup site. At very low cost, can also provide a mirror site at a different geographic location. The backup sites are thousands of miles apart – in different parts of the country, or different parts of the world, so there is small chance of them both being out at once. The mirror site is updated every night. The backup site is also done nightly. Backup just backs up the data. While the mirror site you can log into and use just like the main site.

Importing the data is a slightly larger job, so it is more likely you will want to use the import features of Customer Care. The Pricing Table for instance can be stored in a spreadsheet. So if you can put your information into that format, it can easily be imported. Collins Software can provide a custom setup service – to help you get started.

Whatever system you use now can be modified. You can slowly migrate your Sales, Quotations and Scheduling functions to this new way of doing things. You are moving to a sales management system where everything is visible. These things need to done at the executive level of the organization. You are changing the procedures of the company in a very fundamental way. Most likely your people are using spreadsheets or partial solutions now. Moving to an integrated approach can mean resistance and uncertainty.

Sales might be used to putting everything in Word documents, cut and paste. Use Excel to do price estimates. When you come in with a new system, people are going to be reluctant to change. Once they get into the system, there is a ten-fold increase in productivity, and a hundred-fold sharing and visibility of information. Right now the systems are not integrated, so many questions that come up are simply ignored. Who did we bid to? Why did we bid that? Who is the account at company xyz? When do we start? Is there a shutdown? Will the shutdown affect our schedule? Hundreds of questions a day – critical to your operation.

When you have someone quit, you lose all the information people are carrying in their head. Particularly salesmen, you lose a huge amount. In Customer Care, salesmen’s information is carefully separated. One salesman cannot see the other salesmen’s customers. But the boss and Operations can see everything they need to get the job done. The Customer list is carefully secured.

Collins Software can provide in-house training for your employees. Basically one day per employee is all that it takes to learn the system. The same for administrators and schedulers. The salesmen do not need to know how to schedule, but we will tell everyone generally what is going on. The schedulers get a separate class. These are two to four hour classes. One for Salesmen, one for Schedulers, one for Administrators, one for general employees (maybe a thirty minute online presentation).

All of the consolidation of reports and updating of the system is done online by Customer Care System. That is one main points of having an integrated system. You do not have to wait around for someone to come to your location to do this for you. Everything is done online.

Large Company System – 300+ employees to be scheduled. You could have about 20 people per scheduler. You might be able to handle more people with each scheduler using Customer Care System. But you start off working with the same groups you have currently.

In general, the biggest change people will notice is the amount of operation-critical information they have available. For Corporate, you can see what people are doing. Probably 90% of Operations data is never sent to Accounting. The Accounting-based systems are not going to satisfy Operations. Operations wants to know about resources, people and timing – and only incidentally the money involved. There are a lot of checks and balances in the system so the whole system works together.

Any procedural change for a large company is going to take a while. For a large company, plan on taking a year for this overall implementation. A division or one office can be trained in a few days and be up and running. But to implement 40 divisions you are going to take about a week per division. That stretches out to about a year. You can try to make it go faster, but unless there a critical business reason for going faster, it is best to take time. If changes are not smooth, then perhaps you want to take more time to make sure things are implement properly. For instance, linking into an inventory system might make one of your business procedures much more effective, so you will want to take the time to do this for one or several divisions. Flexibility is a key eleement of a smooth implementation.

There will be a higher level of security. Your different geographic locations probably are going to be separate. You need to spend more time on roles and responsibilities. You can segregate priviledges and roles of each division and each employee.

Large corporations are probably going to be interested in a corporate license for Customer Care System. That way it can be implemented on their system behind their exisiting corporate firewall. They are likely to have the staff and equipment already. The corporate license is $185,000 for the first year, and then $45,000 each year for updates and support. Compare that to paying for the system to be run on secure servers. There might be 30 divisions of 20. That would be roughly $10,000 per month or $120,000 per year. If you are really hitting the system hard, or you have very critical backup needs, or a lot of turn-over in staff, then it can go up. Depending on the part of country the costs can vary. Somewhere around 500 or 600 employees a company will want to start thinking about a corporate license. The main reason for a corporate license is probably security. You want the system in-house. But in terms of performance and simplicity – having secure servers, everything outside is the better deal.

To put this in perspective, think about hiring people to do what Customer Care System is designed and built to do. A really smart and conscientious person is going to cost you at least $100,000 a year, and they are going to work only 40-60 hours a week. For a small system, you can only push your people so far and they get sick, forget things, do not want to share what they know. All kinds of problems. Compare the Customer Care System with the number of people you would have to hire, train and keep in order to provide the same level of tracking and detailed information.

You might wonder why it is so inexpensive. That is because rather than having to maintain a separate system in many different locations and environments, CCS only needs to be maintained in secure and stable environments that are the same for every customer. Updates only need to be done once.

Small Company System – One to ten people to schedule. Everyone in the company looking at the information. One or two people responsible for the schedule. Each service person can log in and look at their own schedule. Their own weekly schedule, and they can look at the overall schedule so they can see what is going on. Cost is $150 a month. This provides an internet server, all the software. Each person gets a userid and password. The administrator is a company person who assigns priveledges and roles (who is doing what and their access to the system). Average time is a few minutes per person to get employee information in the system.

Entering or importing your own information to get started. You need to put employee information, prices for products and services, corporate name and information. You need a bid letter, terms and conditions, cover letter, template for the invoice. We provide basic templates, but you can customize them. Customer information is entered as needed, or you can import name, address, phone, customer id, and other basic information at once. Enter customer and employee codes to link you to accounting and human resources systems.

Tracking Costs: As part of the pricing information, you can (and should) enter your basic costs. The system will then automatically calculate margins. For every crew, every job, you will know precisely where you are making money, and who is generating that income.

You get a whole suite of reports to track sales, margins, customers, employees, equipment – a complete view of your entire business.

You can see the whole company schedule at a glance. You schedule crews to perform the work. Each crew assigns one or more employees along with the equipment to do the job. Schedules is in 15 minute increments. Crews are assigned to orders. An order is a customer order or a company order. Company orders include vacation time, sick leave, travel – anything you want to track – you can put a code and color to track. You can add custom notes for each crew – as many notes as you need, as many crews as you need. Cells in the schedule are marked with comments and the color code tells you the order a crew is assigned to. Comments are indicated with a small triangle.

The Man-Hour Calculation Table breaks down individual tasks into steps and their associated man-hours. For instance, you are going to install three pieces of equipment, the first takes 45 minutes, the second takes three hours, and the third takes two hours. You need two people with particular skills for the first task, four people with a different set of skills for the second task, and two people with still different skills for the third.

When you are scheduling, you have all the employees and equipment that are available ready at a glance. You can point and click to assign people and equipment to a crew. You can quickly generate a daily, weekly and monthly schedule for the whole crew. Again, each person on the crew, or the crew boss can get to their own schedule and the schedule of the people they will be working with.

Medium Size Company. 10 to 30 people to be scheduled. One or two people handling the schedule – depending on the complexity of your operation. You could have 200 people in the company, but want to track the activities and income generating capability of this particular group -- engineers, technicians, installers, drivers, electricians, contractors, repair staff, helpers, admin support, support staff, heavy equipment operators. Each individual employee on the crew can have their own equipment and tools. Equipment and tools can also be assigned and scheduled for the whole crew. For equipment you can assign requirements – so you are assured that you get qualified people assigned to use the equipment. Cost is $500 to $1000 a month. We provide a dedicated internet server and backups for your operations, all the software. Software is

Setup time for a Medium Size Company. A few minutes per employee. Enter or import your list of clients. Enter or import prices for products and services broken down into categories (services, equipment prices, travel times, per diem). Cost per unit, unit name (cost per hour, cost per day, cost per employee, cost per mile).

You can ask for Custom Services. These are likely to be custom table imports, custom data extracts, custom reports. A medium size company is likely to have existing systems where Customer Care System needs to link – Accounting, Management Information Systems. Many companies use spreadsheets and small databases to collect and maintain this currently.

Sharing Information: The real benefit is that your Sales, Operations and other staff share a system. The focus in on Operations and Sales – because that is where you money comes from. If you keep track of your clients and leads, if you can bid and offer quickly and professionally, if you can deliver your service without flaw – then you are going to make money and build client satisfaction. The information is online for everyone in your company. You decide who should see what – all your information is available. Operations, Management and Accounting can see precisely what prices were bid, what was performed

Reports and Data Access: Sales Quota reports, Sales Revenue, Projected Sales, Targets, Commission Calculations, How are people performing. None of the information is lost. Can track your employees better – to see who was assigned where,

Things You Can Track

Rate Sheets - Create and deliver customizable PDF Rate Sheets for your products and services. Provide a unique Rate Sheet for each customer
 

Quotes - Create professional and consistent PDF Quotes for your customers with optional cover letter, terms and conditions. Quotes are linked to customer Rate Sheet

Bid Reports – Download working reports in Excel. Automatically generated pivot tables provide extensive user interaction, and sheets are automatically updated once created (the Excel sheet is linked to the database). (open an actual XLS Bid report, or XLS Bid report without conditional formatting)
 

Customer Orders - Build customer orders from scratch or import from awarded Quotes. Maintain the complete details of an order. Includes creation of Invoices as PDF documents to be emailed or printed for delivery to the client.

Product/Service Files - Maintain the price and cost of your products and services. Integrated in the Rate Sheets, Quotes and the Order systems
 

Staff Files - Maintain list of Employees, define divisions, assign privileges and roles
 

Customer Files - Maintain Customer database. Customers are organized by Company / Division / Facility. Includes a list of all company contacts, plus work site requirements, and customer related documents
 

Customer Portal - Your customers can review their bids, schedules and orders online
 

Staff and Equipment Schedules – Assign staff and equipment to service orders. Day/Week/Month views to track all related Job activity. Verify the availability of employees and equipment including vacations, sick time, days off. Quickly identify the utilization of your valuable resources
 

Critical Personnel Information - In a service organization your people are your greatest asset. Keep track of Operations and Margin-related personnel information - employee skills, qualifications, safety classes, drug screening, education, licenses, training, and emergency contacts Schedule training and staff development. Maximize your return on employee investments
 

Vehicle and Equipment Inventory - Maintain a list of company rolling assets with related dates of purchase, insurance, and license renewal. Track assignment to employees

Personalizing and Using Your System 

Reporting - Customize your Reports. A complete reporting system with automatic email distribution
 

Database Portal - Batch Read/Write access to the database. This is for routine links of this information to/from your existing systems
 

Web Site Integration – Add employee and customer log in to your existing website. Make a seamless integration of the system into your website - Change colors, fonts and display characteristics of the Customer Care System forms – so that CCS becomes a part of your website and your company
 

On-Line Backup and Recovery System - Create Backup and Recovery of user files and databases to protect yourself from disasters. We offer weekly backup with your basic system, and a range of backup and recovery options – depending on the critical nature of your business. We offer a range of mirror sites, hot backups – for your most critical needs
 

User Forms and Command System - Add Integrated user commands and forms to handle custom requirements. Integrated on-line editing and creation of html forms and scripts. What this means is that you can adapt the system to meets your very individual needs – but where Managers and Owners know what is going on
 

System Object Customization - Rename the systems buttons and labels to fit your organizations terminology, for example rename the default term "Account Manager" to "Salesman"