Benefits: Inventory Savings, Happy Customers

After deploying AMPower Service, Pitney now spends less time and money on callbacks and return visits to customers because of its improved inventory controls and management. The company has been able to reduce its excess parts inventory by 22 percent, thanks to ERP data that techs glean from AMPower Service.

Pitney's field workers also now handle more service requests per day, because they spend less time on each call, Weston says.

On the customer satisfaction front, Pitney has been able to improve management of its customer service level agreements due to AMPower Service's real-time field progress reports, the ability to prioritize service calls on the fly, and intelligent notification functionality for urgent service calls. Because Pitney field techs enter progress information into corporate systems in real time, its call center reps also have better visibility in the service process and can provide more accurate information and completion timelines to customers, he says.

Three Criteria for Winning Solution

Weston says he chose Antenna's mobile technology for three reasons. First, the other solutions that he considered were largely Web-based, which meant that field workers wouldn't be able to access systems or information in areas without cellular connectivity. And store and forward functionality, or the ability to push information to users devices and then store a local copy, is absolutely essential to Pitney; its field force often works in locations with poor or no wireless connectivity, such as rural locales without nearby cell towers or buildings with thick concrete walls, and even sometimes in facilities where wireless signals are purposely blocked. Antenna's product offers store and forward functionality, and it's the single most valuable aspect of this offering, Weston says.

Second key selling point: Antenna specializes in mobile applications and therefore offers a higher level of usability and device portability, Weston says. So the company can use both Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices without sacrificing any functionality because an app was written for one platform or the other, according to Weston.

As Antenna CEO Jim Hemmer notes, "CIOs are looking for a platform. They're looking for the ability to build an application and not have to be dependent on a specific device," Hemmer says. "They want the ability to roll those applications out and manage them over multiple devices."

Finally, Antenna was the only Siebel-certified offering for mobile CRM from an external vendor that Pitney could find at the time, so support was available through Siebel if necessary, according to Weston.