As one of the nation's largest independent road breakdown management companies, Cherryville, NC-based FleetNet America covers the full spectrum of emergency breakdown requirements. Some of these include mechanical, tires, and towing, in short, any service need that hinders their trucking clients' equipment from rolling is available via the company's 24/7/365 network.
FleetNet America's vendor network is more than 60,000 and the company's 30 coordinators have an average of more than 20 years experience in fleet maintenance, ranging from shop management to floor mechanic, as well as tire and recapping venues. The company, with 51 employees, is privately held and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Arkansas Best Corporation of Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Volume is always heavy at the company's call center and averages about 10,000 calls each month. According to FleetNet America CEO Oren Summer, coordinators were using small cassette recorders at each station with a pickup to the phone. "Response times are very critical to our operation," Summer said. "We need to know quickly where a unit is, what's wrong with it, and dispatch assistance right away. The cassette recorders were unreliable and accessing conversations was very difficult," Summer said. "We needed to find something that did more."
Fortunately, the company did find something. An innovative digital telephone recording solution is now helping FleetNet America improve productivity and service their varied clientele more effectively. Known as Phone 2 PC-Call Center, the product, from San Diego-based Konexx (www.konexx.com), is installed on an individual PC or notebook. The software is compatible with any Microsoft Windows operating system and recorded files may be stored on FleetNet America's local hard drive or dedicated network servers.
A Phone 2 PC-Call Center interface connects a telephone handset to a computer sound card, allowing coordinators to record telephone conversations directly to compressed WAV files that can be e-mailed as attachments or archived for future reference. Recordings can be easily annotated with the coordinators comments either at the beginning or end of the original recording. A digital voice stamp is placed at the beginning and end of the original recording to ensure security. Users can select on-demand or voice activated recording too. There are now 25 Phone 2 PC-Call Center stations in place. Summer said his coordinators are usually dealing with emergency situations and a lot of times the callers are "under the gun" and sometimes forget how necessary accurate information is to the proper assessment of the situation.
"A trucker may tell us he broke down at a particular intersection, when in fact he may be either moving or in some cases several exits from the first location assessment," Summer said. "By having a time stamp on the recording, it dispels all theories of possible communication errors and interpretations with regards to strategic time and information data. We now know to the second when someone calls in." Summer added that Phone 2 PC-Call Center is also helpful as an audit function. "A coordinator may be told by a caller that a specific tire size is required and when we send the vendor out to him, it turns out it's the wrong size," Summer said. "We can quickly determine whether the caller did indeed give us the correct size or if the vendor misinterpreted the tire size information, since we can immediately access the recording."
Summer said the system has enabled his five supervisors to conduct more extensive communications training because there is instant playback and they can critique techniques and proper phone etiquette. "We can annotate certain sections, show them phrases that need to be modified, corrected or improved upon," he said. "We can access and listen to conversations virtually anywhere - from my office, or out in the field via a laptop."
Postage and storage costs have also been dramatically reduced. Most of FleetNet America's clients now ask for the WAV files, which are emailed and can be accessed in minutes instead of hours. The company no longer has to mail cassette tapes and doesn't have to store thousands of the tapes on-site.
"Our business is growing 30-40 percent a year so it was vital to find a
system that could expand with us," Summer said. "Other systems we
investigated were anywhere from five to 10 times more expensive and didn't
do nearly as much as what we have. We can now conveniently store files on
our network, the quality of our recording has improved, and we can e-mail
files when needed. The Konexx Phone 2 PC-Call Center has become an integral
element of our business."
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