Success Story: TSAChoice
 |
Company: TSAChoice,
Inc
Asheville, North Carolina
Industry: Telecom / Computer Networking
Contact:
Chip White
Title: Marketing Director
Phone: (828) 254 6878 x 340
E-mail: cwhite@tsachoice.com
|
| FrontZone's
FrontSupport product is, hands down, the best support solution for any
organization that needs to track requests or other service events and
integrate them with GoldMine. For TSAChoice, it has given us the tools
to take our responsiveness to customers to another level. FrontZone
has developed a product that is robust and flexible, and compares
favorably to much more expensive solutions from other vendors!
-
Chip White,
Marketing Director, TSAChoice
|
Company
Profile
TSAChoice
is one of the oldest and largest VARs in Western North Carolina,
providing advanced telephone, computer, network, and other business technology
solutions. The company was
established in 1982, and has grown to 53 employees and $7M in annual sales. It
serves 2,600 business customers in Western North Carolina.
Problem
In
the year 1999, TSAChoice acquired a smaller company specializing in computer
and networking sales and service. In examining how to integrate two entirely
different service and sales methodologies with different customer bases, they
decided to develop a single point of contact for all customer issues
by creating a Customer Care center staffed with individuals with several
different levels of expertise. Functionally, TSAChoice maintains two primary field service groups (telephone and
computer/network) as well as
numerous smaller service groups (training/implementation, web hosting,
computer telephony).
Chip
White, Marketing Director of TSAChoice says, "One of the biggest challenges in creating
our Customer Care center was to locate a product that, properly implemented, would track
our support issues and make it
procedurally impossible for issues to slip through the crack. If a support
issue is not resolved
at first contact, we need to track it properly to make sure that whoever took
responsibility for incident ultimately completed and closed the incident!"
Solution
TSAChoice
chose FrontSupport as their customer care solution. FrontSupport has worked
perfectly in fulfilling the needs of their Customer Care team. Through the use
of FrontSupport and its integration with GoldMine, all incidents are tracked
while they are open, enabling any rep handling a call to view open incidents
for a given customer, determine to whom the incident has been assigned, and
immediately get a status update. Additionally, requests that are in danger of
dropping beyond commitment time can easily be noted and
reassigned to another person if needed. Supervisors and senior
management can at any time view the status of open incidents. All
staff, particularly the customer's assigned salesperson or implementation
specialist, can view the presence of all pending and closed incidents from
directly within the Goldmine "History" view, so they are never put
in the embarrassing situation of contacting a customer without knowing that
there is a pending issue.
Why
FrontSupport?
TSAChoice
has a highly automated environment. All their field technicians, salespeople, senior
management, and most of the installers/technicians have Goldmine on their laptop or
desktop computers. Goldmine is the master
tool used to track the sales process and assist in scheduling of installations.
They also use Winnsoft Service Manager and Great Plains
Accounting to manage their field service groups and billing. TSAChoice
needed a support solution that would integrate with their existing
GoldMine database so that the maximum number of staff members could have access to the
historical data about support incidents.
Chip White says, "We spent more than three months doing a rather exhaustive search and
evaluation of customer support software products, including Blue Ocean, Siebel,
HEAT, and a number of others. We also spent considerable time evaluating the
practicality of implementing the solution directly in GoldMine. Virtually all
of the solutions we evaluated except
for FrontSupport had one or more severe limitations - either in tracking,
history, functionality, security, or structure of screens and reporting, that
made it undesirable for our needs. FrontSupport
is a perfect fit for our support needs!"
Because
FrontSupport uses the industry-standard Microsoft Access
database as the backend database, it is easy for them to retrieve the support data
for use in other applications (like Crystal Reports, MS Excel etc.).
Benefits
The
quality and consistency of TSAChoice's customer follow-up has improved considerably
after the implementation of FrontSupport in their Customer Care center.
Management also has better reporting on both the number and types of incidents
coming in to Customer Care and their response to those incidents. The direct
sales staff now has better awareness of issues arising with key customers.
Previously, such information, if recorded at all, was available only in their
standalone service call management solution that did not integrate with GoldMine. Now that
their support solution FrontSupport integrates with GoldMine, the sales department
has immediate access to support information.
Soon
TSAChoice plans to provide full FrontSupport access to each of their direct sales
staff. When implemented, this will give Customer Care staff the
ability to assign FrontSupport incidents directly to the responsible sales
person when a key customer requires priority assistance or an upsell
opportunity is uncovered. This will further enhance both the customer's
experience and management's ability to monitor after-the-sale support by the
sales staff.
Chip
comments, "FrontZone's FrontSupport product is, hands down, the best
support solution for any organization that needs to track requests or other
service events and integrate them with GoldMine. For TSAChoice, it has
given us the tools to take our responsiveness to customers to another level.
FrontZone has developed a product that is robust and flexible, and
compares favorably to much more expensive solutions from other vendors! "
