Deutsche Telekom maintains 118 service support centres in 39 subsidiaries throughout Germany for its business customers. A total of 9,000 off-site employees - services engineers, technicians and mechanics - ensure that all problems are dealt with quickly. Deutsche Telekom receives more than five million customer calls annually in the business customer service sector alone.

Approximately 50% of these calls result in a service employee call to the customer location. The service staff deals with an annual total of 2.5 million customer service jobs and the average time required to sort out a disruption to a telephone connection is twelve hours. However, according to Deutsche Telekom's records the bulk of service jobs (especially in the major cities) are finished within two hours. It is no wonder that, according to a study carried out by Mercer, a British research association, the quality of Deutsche Telekom's service puts it in the top four telecom companies worldwide.

To further improve its customer service, Deutsche Telekom has updated the technology used in its customer service organisation. As far back as 1996 Telekom equipped 1,800 service engineers with notebooks, as part of the "SATURN" project. When this project was expanded by providing a further 2,000 service engineers with notebooks, Deutsche Telekom selected equipment from Toshiba's Satellite range with CD ROM and floppy drives, ChipCardReaders as access protection and a free V.24 interface for programming telecommunications devices. Together with mobile printers, the notebooks have become solutions, which fit into a briefcase, specially developed and produced by the Siemens AG Solution Centre in Cologne on behalf of Telekom. This package allows the service engineer to reach the case easily even when they are on the road - and to prevent the case sliding about in the car it is simply secured to the passenger seat with a restraining strap.

Flexible control for the service team
Whether they have to remove disruptions from telephone connections, install equipment, or perform maintenance for a business customer, Deutsche Telekom's service engineers are now sent details of their tasks electronically to their Toshiba notebook.

"In the morning, our employees access our Telekom network at home. They receive their tasks on-line, including all the information about the order they require", explains Karl-Georg Auernhammer, acting manager of Deutsche Telekom's business customer service centre in Darmstadt and who has a leading role in the "SATURN" project. "They can also log onto the Deutsche Telekom computers to request replacement parts or order other parts on-line."

As soon as the service engineers complete a task they inform their task scheduler in the in-house service team. Once again they do this electronically via their notebook, which means the engineers do not have to call in to find out about their next task or tell the scheduler that the task has been completed.

"The speed of communications has increased enormously with SATURN," Auernhammer is pleased to report. The time-consuming filling out of forms by hand at the customer location once the job is finished is also a thing of the past. Now everything is done electronically. The engineer can still write the service reports at the location, send them on-line to the appropriate Deutsche Telekom subsidiary and print them out for the customer. This means there is no need to enter the same data twice (once by the engineer and once by the staff at the subsidiary), and the data can be used more quickly to create service invoices, for example. With SATURN, orders can be processed much faster, the call outs can be controlled more flexibly for each employee and therefore the number of call outs per employee can be increased.

"The mobile office increases not only the effectiveness of the service organisation," says Auernhammer, "but it also increases customer satisfaction."