Nobody wants the Out Of Hours phone!  But this is an opportunity to really impress your customers.

Unfortunately, if you're running a service business and offering national coverage you often have to provide 24/7 cover for emergency reactive calls-outs.  So who gets the dreaded OOH mobile?  Usually it gets rotated around the office, everyone who can be persuaded gets their turn to take the mobile home with them.  What this often means is that the person answering the phone is not always the best person to deal with the call.  

Let's say it's the turn of Sarah from accounts and she gets a call at 2am.  Your customer needs a drainage engineer on site asap and you have a 4 hour service level agreement with them - the clock is ticking.  Let's also say the reactive call-out is in an area not covered by your in-house team (Cornwall for instance) and you need to get a sub-contractor out to the job.

During normal office hours this shouldn't be too much of a problem.  Your operations team know your sub-contractors well.  They know who can do what, who to call and who'll pick up the phone.  But it's not your operations team dealing with this one, it's Sarah from accounts.  

This could be the perfect opportunity for you to really impress your customer - in an ideal world you'd have your best people on it so you can make a great impression.  But you have probably the worst person in the company to deal with this important call (no offense Sarah, you're great at getting the bills paid!).

So we need to find a subcontractor, with the right skill set, who operates out of hours and who covers a specific part of the country.  

We've just released an update to TeamPoint to deal with precisely this issue.

- we've added service areas to subcontractor records so they can be matched to geographic regions

- we've added skill tags to subcontractors so you know what services they offer - electrical, drainage, carpentry, pest-control, security, fencing - whatever you need

- we've added an out-of-hours protocol to subcontractors so you know which ones are available and how to get hold of them

Now all Sarah needs to do is a quick supplier search for Drainage / Cornwall / OOH and she has a list of options she can use in less than a second.  One more click and she has a map view showing exactly where everyone is in relation to the job.  She can also see when they were last used, whether their insurance is up to date and the quality of work from previous jobs.   Sarah now has everything she needs to book the right person to the job and get someone on site with your customer within your SLA.

TeamPoint has enabled your accounts administrator to work like one of the best members of your operations team from home at two o'clock in the morning.   

We love finding real world problems like this and real ways we can help our customers.  

How can we help you?