Heateam – The Service Division of Baxi Potterton

As the UK’s leading heating and home comfort business, the Baxi Group has long been valued for its strong brands and innovative products.  With the launch of new, energy efficient technologies and advanced levels of product performance, Baxi recognized the need to provide similar innovation and excellence in its service operation.

heateam operates with a nationwide network of over 270 field service engineers and sub-contractors, working alongside a team of highly trained call center staff.  To deliver the promise of top-tier customer service, heateam needed to improve their job-booking automation and optimize engineer route scheduling while simultaneously improving other efficiencies in the field.

With around 2200 calls each day, a bottleneck was being created between the call handlers and the planning function.  This began to impact on customer service levels and booking a customer visit often took five minutes or longer.

SERVICEPower was implemented to provide customer focused appointments and optimize engineer route planning which would maximize productivity both in the call center and the field. 

The new system is faster and operates in real-time.  By automatically scanning all engineer schedules, heateam can now determine the lowest cost engineer to send to a job.  Offering customers a timed call enhances the heateam service – the service is so flexible that for domestic customers the call operator can schedule visits around the school run.

To further increase productivity, heateam needed to decrease engineer mileage and minimize travel times.  SERVICEPower achieves this through route optimization, which enables the system to react to changes, e.g. overruns, delays, etc. as they occur.  Jobs can then be re-arranged and automatically rescheduled while taking into account changing workloads and circumstances as they unfold each day.