Nashua Finance, the internal finance company for the Nashua group, has implemented HEAT, the service management solution from FrontRange Solutions, to enable it to meet ISO requirements for tracking and reporting on customer feedback.
Nashua Finance provides asset-based finance on a rental basis for the office automation industry. It focuses on supporting Nashua's +-30 franchises around South Africa.
Implemented over a two-month period and going live in July 2006, HEAT replaced Nashua Finance's in-house call logging system - having been customised before implementation to comply with and enforce the company's specific ISO requirements.
"We knew exactly what we wanted, not only because ISO set the standards for us, but also because the shortcomings of our original system had shown us what our priorities needed to be," says Nashua Finance - Divisional Director - Credit, Nicholas Tuttelberg. "So the HEAT system that is now in place is giving us precisely what we wanted and we don't anticipate having to change it any time soon."
Tuttelberg is particularly pleased with the quality of statistics about customer complaints and compliments delivered by HEAT. "Customers don't only talk to management about service. Very often, it will be a clerk in the accounts department or a receptionist that is told something - and before we had HEAT, that sort of feedback was never recorded formally.
"Now, every one of our 36 members of staff inputs customer feedback into HEAT and we are getting a realistic picture of how we are performing as perceived by our customers. We never had those sorts of statistics before.
"Also, because we can segment call status in exact detail, as well as in trend format, we can take action to address deficiencies in our service in an objective and organised way.
"And, by being able to monitor and report on customer feedback and then action and implement our responses in a much more coherent way than before, we can now personalise our service to customers to a far greater degree."
FrontRange Solutions (SA) product manager for Africa, Paul Bornhutter, says HEAT lends itself to the imposition of standards systems such as ISO for three reasons.
"The first is the fact that HEAT is designed to facilitate process management and standards of whatever sort can only be imposed by means of processes.
"Secondly, HEAT makes working with detailed data extremely simple - from the point of capture to the point of reporting. And, while the devil may well lurk in the detail; the answer to a problem is much easier to find if you know all there is to know about it.
"And thirdly, FrontRange Solutions as a company was one of the first software vendors to become standards conscious and not only apply international standards to our own software development processes, but also incorporate standards tools in our solutions so our customers would automatically become compliant once they had installed them. In that context, we were the first vendor to incorporate Information Technology Infrastructure Library components and tools into our products.
"In other words, if you're looking to be standards compliant in whatever sense, HEAT is going to make achieving that much easier."
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