The Project
Koncerted is a startup venture that installs, maintains and enables their discerning customer base to maximize their home’s digitally controlled systems — be they A/V entertainment systems or infrastructure devices such as HVAC and lighting controls. Koncerted prides themselves on being up to date on all of the latest trends and technologies, and offers the very highest quality customer service. Our long time partner, and friend, Conor Feely, Koncerted’s director of marketing and training was tasked to develop a workflow that would enable easy creation and distribution of job assignments to their remote customer service technicians. He approached us for help with this task.
The Challenge
Being a startup, there was not much capital for buying fully, tricked-out workflow and CRM systems. There were reasonably priced options for each, and high priced options for each, but nothing that was adaptable enough, nor priced in a way that made financial sense. We needed to be able to assign jobs to the field techs and get them the details of their assignment in an efficient manner, while creating a record of the service provided to the customer. Given the clientele, the initial connection often came via a phone call — rather than through the web — and efficiently capturing and distributing client information within Koncerted and with the client was paramount.
The Solution
We began the engagement by creating a series of user stories focusing on the three key users in the scenario: the client, the Customer Service Rep (CSR) who would take the initial call, and the operations/tech team who would ultimately deliver the solution. Once we had a significant body of stories that all started with “as a user I want to…” we began to research the various ways we could execute what we needed to do.
There were many options on the table, from free, open-source to high-priced licensed solutions. Many were great as ticketing systems, many functioned well as CRMs. We ended up opting for a reasonably priced CRM that we tailored in sessions that we dubbed “hackathons,” to create the workflow. Once we’d devised the flow to capture necessary information in the initial client call, we further tailored the tool to facilitate notification of the operations team and subsequently the field tech(s).
We documented the flow to guide CSRs, and Ops People from intake through post-service-visit follow-up. We also highlighted integration moments where some info needed to be added to third party applications that tied into business intelligence apps used by the financial team, as well as company wide calendars. The solution was custom built for a reasonable price, on a reasonably priced platform and has been in operation for over 5 years, and has enabled Koncerted to deliver thousands of client engagements.
Lesson Learned
Creating a body of user stories enabled us to take a user-centric approach to the workflow development, and ensured that we were able to capture the key steps for the key constituencies.
We played around with different systems — this play was key to finding the right system
Once we’d determined the right tool we focused on rapid prototyping of scenarios, refining them as needed
It is possible to “MacGyver” an effective solution — and you should not be afraid to do so.