The Challenge
As a contractor for social housing organisations, Crystal Clear has more than 50 customers who each have thousands of their own customers; all of which Crystal Clear could complete work for.
The paper process for managing all of these jobs became very onerous. Operatives are often on the road for a week at a time and consequently, the paperwork for all completed jobs wouldn’t be returned until the following week.
The lack of visibility and inflexibility of a paper-based system was hindering business performance and growth opportunities. This prompted Crystal Clear to explore alternative solutions.
The Solution
The requirements for Crystal Clear were simple; To replicate what they did before, but much more efficiently, whilst gaining far greater visibility.
Crystal Clear narrowed their options down to two service management solutions, both of which had experience working in the housing sector. One was an on-premise solution, while Oneserve is cloud-based.
Oneserve was selected because, as Operations Manager Joel Moorhouse explains, “Due to the cloud platform, Oneserve came with no upfront costs and was a modern and flexible solution.”
Once selected, we created detailed requirements and set about implementing Oneserve. To help transition from paper to software, Crystal Clear recruited a consultant who specialised in selecting software solutions for the housing industry and they said, “Oneserve was the smoothest implementation process for any software implementation I have been involved in.”
“With the paper system, the more customers we won, the harder it became to manage. Oneserve is the complete reverse. Since getting Oneserve, the workload doesn’t even compare. I remember a time an employee spent hours and hours creating a report but now, to generate the same report, we just click a few buttons. As a result, our business has grown exponentially but we haven’t needed to employ any further admin staff because their admin burden has been significantly reduced.”
Joel Moorhouse, Operations Manager
The Result
Enabling growth at no extra cost
Since using Oneserve, Crystal Clear has grown significantly, securing many new clients. Oneserve has enabled Crystal Clear to secure contracts not previously possible. Despite the greater demands these larger customers put on Crystal Clear, they can easily meet them thanks to the reporting functionality within the system.
Furthermore, because the administration involved in arranging a job has been significantly reduced, they have secured all of this work without needing to recruit any new office staff.
One of the major frustrations with the previous paper-based system was that a cancelled job would equate to lost time, because the time delay and communication difficulties made it very difficult to reschedule an operative’s day. With Oneserve, Crystal Clear quickly assign a different job to an operative, whilst rescheduling the cancelled job. They are also able to adjust routes to maximise operative working time.
As work is completed, the office staff have complete visibility and can take appropriate actions (such as invoicing) as soon as the operative closes the job on their mobile phone. The immediacy and detail of information that can be extracted from Oneserve has transformed Crystal Clear’s customer service and business performance.
Scheduling has become an easy process: Crystal Clear can now easily reorganise an operative's day if a job is cancelled
Reporting used to take up hours of time: With Oneserve, comprehensive reports are now only a few clicks away
Real-time access to data on engineers' mobile phones has significantly increased the speed in which tasks are completed