Field Service

Alorica’s Nationwide On-Site Services Network

Field Service adds the ultimate touch to a complete post-sales customer services and support operation. Field service technicians serve as “doctors” or installers for your customers, performing house calls for home or office equipment, appliances, and electronic products. In today’s markets where post-sales services represent one of the sharpest edges in product sales and customer retention, a solid Field Service offering is a necessity for manufacturers and retailers of office equipment, home electronics, and appliances.

Whether you are a consumer electronics manufacturer selling directly over the Internet or a retailer selling through your own store channels and over the Internet, you most likely need the capability to deliver cost effective, professional on-site services. Depending on the type of product and warranty, your customers will expect on-site service. Based on the competitive offerings in your industry, the nature of the products you sell and other factors, your customer’s will often expect on-site services.

For some of Alorica’s clients, buying, installing and maintaining an in-house Field Service management system represents the best solution to their needs. For such customers, Alorica offers the leading Web-based, enterprise Field Services software solution. However, for many of Alorica’s other customers, Helix Field Service (Helix FS), makes more business sense through a managed service.

Alorica’s Field Services Application, a part of Helix by Alorica®

Alorica’s Field Service solution is a proven high-end product that automates and streamlines all business processes involved with coordinating any type of on-site service visit and through any type of Field Service organization. Alorica’s clients can implement Helix FS as a component application dedicated only to Field Service department. However, many of Alorica’s clients use Helix FS for its full strategic value, as an integral part of the comprehensive customer services and support life cycle.

“However, to maximize revenue, companies should look at the services opportunity as a lifecycle rather than an event or even a series of discrete events. The lifecycle starts with the initial product sale and continues through the adoption of new products. Service lifecycle management positions companies to go after the 50% to 70% of potential revenue that they miss in the latter part of the lifecycle.” AMR Research report, “Service Lifecycle Management (Part 1)”, Aug. 2002

Helix by Alorica® is the leading customer services and support management system for all processes and activities of an enterprise service life cycle from contract center through every aspect of reverse logistics. Helix FS enables the customer services representative (CSR) in the contact center to pre-arrange and coordinate all materials, parts, products and human skills to assure that every aspect of the on-site service is completed swiftly and professionally. Helix FS enables the CSR to coordinate all sorts of people, processes and materials into a highly collaborative work environment. Helix FS creates the invaluable live links between the people who need to exchange information and use automated processes, workflow, and collaboration in order to push their organization to carry out their daily task while still maintaining the overall corporate strategic goals and wealth creation. Helix FS brings together customers, delivery, field technicians, parts houses, and offices for a complete customer experience.

Helix FS Automates Many Field Services Processes

Using the Internet, Field Service agents enjoy an easy to use; easy to learn mobile application that can go wherever they go. It enables them to carry out their job paperless, seamless, collaborative, and well informed. The FS agents have all information and processes at their traveling fingertips. Time and expense tracking is precise and hardly noticeable in terms of data entry because its information is captured at the click of a button. Of course, service tickets are one of the main drivers in the FS process.

Helix FS automates most of the service ticket process thereby minimizing any administrative, wrap-up or research time. Helix FS manages all aspects of the FS agent’s job including parts ordering, scheduling, job receipt printing, RMA ticket creation for the replaced part, as well as tracking and history management of truck inventory, job, equipment, and tools. FS agents can easily find standard service instructions, take notes and suggestions for future services as well as for opportunities for up/cross sales and transmit this information in a wireless mode. Moreover, when the job is complete, the FS agent can obtain an electronic receipt / worksheet signature from the customer. The time and expense and all other billing and costing information can be transmitted immediately back to the server. Helix FS integrates well with most financial accounting packages such as Oracle or Great Plains and others in order to pass the costing and billing, and payroll as financial transaction information into the appropriate journal.

Some of Alorica’s clients choose to use Helix FS with their legacy Contact Center application. Such integration is possible, but assuming that Helix Contact Center application is used with Helix FS, the CSR can allocate all required agents by skill sets, profile, location, and availability. The CSR can pre-arrange all aspects of the FS agent’s on-site visit before it occurs thus assuring that the service is rendered swiftly and professionally. CSR or designated dispatchers, always know the status of the service ticket as well as many other key items such as the inventory or any selected agent’s truck, the tools, or the tracking of any parts special ordered for a particular job.

Helix FS includes a complete reporting of key performance indicators of all aspects of the FS operations. Helix’ powerful knowledge-base automatically stores all pertinent information regarding customers, the services rendered, the agent’s work, and all other information useful for management review, decisions and process analysis for improvements.

Alorica’s Managed Services for On-Site Service Operations

Capital investments, cash flow, many factors of your financial profile are affected when you purchase an information system. Many of Alorica’s clients choose to go with the managed services approach. After the “purchase or outsource” analysis, Alorica’s professional services team, working closely with our clients, discover that outsourcing yields the most favorable ROI compared to purchasing licenses to the software solutions, implementing, and allocating IT staff to maintain the system. This business decision depends on the many aspects of your operational situation.

Alorica’s managed services include all aspects of post-sales customer services and support from the contact center through all areas of returns. Would you like to benefit from a turnkey field service operation available as quickly as possible, without the implementation project and other task? Bringing your purchased software solution into your computer center, testing it and deploying it to the field service agents are the principle tasks involved in the purchase of Alorica’s Helix applications. As an alternative, you could opt to simply pay a small monthly rental fee. Alorica’s IT and engineering staff are already highly skilled at deploying a Helix FS solution for your specific requirements of your service organization.

In Alorica’s experience, very few manufacturers or retailers care to develop and manage the field service infrastructure as part of their core competency. To enable your organization to focus on your core strategic wealth creation, Alorica offers to provide the complete management of your field services operations. Or for that matter, unlike any other vendor in post-sales customer services and support, Alorica can offer you managed services for the full 360-degree view of every aspect in the “services life cycle management.”

Over the years, Alorica has developed expertise in all areas of customer services and support. For field service in particular, Alorica offers you a well-established infrastructure that includes a network of field service agents nationwide as well as the collaborative, cost-effective work environment delivered through the use of Helix FS. With Alorica’s managed services, you benefit from the long-standing, well-experienced infrastructures of the people, processes and cutting-edge technology, without the burden of running it.

Field Service Technical Support

Alorica provides Field Service Technical Support for both PC end-users and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) Partners, which includes 24 x 7 toll-free technical support hotlines. Customers first contact Alorica’s toll-free technical support number for troubleshooting. If the problem can not be resolved over the phone, i.e., if the issue involves hardware failure, Alorica will notify the OEM Partner to ship the necessary replacement part to the customer. Alorica will then dispatch a field technician to the defective product’s location to perform the on-site repairs. The complete dispatch and field service process is automated through Helix’s Field Service Management Application.

Once an Alorica TSR enters the call notes into the application, an email notice to ship a replacement part is generated and sent to the appropriate OEM Partner. Once the OEM Partner logs the shipping confirmation into Helix via their Helix web-portal, Helix automatically sends a service request email to Alorica’s field service administrator to dispatch a technician. The case is closed as soon as the field technician enters the service outcome into Helix, again via a web-portal.

For more information, please contact us or, if you're in the U.S., call 1-866-ALORICA (1-866-256-7422).