The story with the Rapport call handling system spans back a ways in time, to the late 1990’s when using PCs for call handling was an alien concept to most people but, NESN came up with something that, for its time, was very good. 

What it did was log and track service calls, to a degree though back them all manually, but every night it called the mothership and relayed all the information that had been updated during the day. 

Great idea, but unfortunately, it only worked with jobs placed for NESN and on their system, so it is very limited for general use. 

That changed over time and the system could be used to log other stuff and a number of us used this old Windows based system for many years. 

We did because it was fast. 

You could enter and update calls in seconds, mostly in real time talking to a customer on the phone which was essential when things were busy on the phones. Any customers reading this should take it the right way, but when you’re busy, you need to complete, log and book a call and get the punter off the phone ASAP to move onto the next. You do not have time to muck about. 

Once NWAR moved we used some other system, Fix something or another that was also Windows based and it was okay but, not as fast. Too much mouse moving and clicking which made it look great but slower to use. And, not as intuitive with multiple screens for one call and so on. 

But it worked and at the time it was all we could get. 

In the early 00’s I started to think about this more as I was getting asked about this at meetings and eventually in the forums, it’s one of those topics that pops up every now and then and I had ideas on how to build a system, what I wanted it to do, how and how I wanted it to talk to other systems as well. 

Inside And Out

You see, I have a lot of experience in the field, several years' worth, and mountains of experience handling calls in the office, admin, and so on, and there are certain things that are truly painful in both areas when it comes to this stuff. 

When you’re out in the field with your head stuck down the back of a machine that last thing you want is phonecalls asking about something or another you’ve just been to or, more commonly, when you’ll be at Mrs Whoever as she’s wanting to take her dog out or cherubs to school etc. It drives field techs bonkers, they’re not being grumpy about it for no reason. 

Solving that, at least as much as possible was a primary goal. 

From the office perspective, there are a bunch of things that really annoy the staff answering phones. 

One is the “when is the engineer going to be here” calls, they are just such a waste of time, you often wanted to say to people, “hang on, I’ll consult the magic eight ball” as we’d have no clue where the guys were, how long they would take in each call, what traffic was like and more. Trying to estimate that is a nightmare. But these calls waste time and are not productive. 

Solving that was a goal. 

Administration, feeding back info to contract clients was also a problem and to a some extent it still is although using Rapport hugely improves that. 

This one wastes time for all: the repairer, the client, and the customer, It’s just not good that all the info isn’t available to them all easily. 

Solving this is what brought about the name of Rapport. 

Solving Prickly Problems

To solve these problems you kinda have to think a bit differently but with the advent of the smartphone a whole bunch of things got a lot easier to solve however, it also brought other isues to the fore. 

One was that no two service companies operated the same way, and neither did two commercial clients. 

Because of this we had to design so as to allow for variation on each system and to do that we made it modular and customisable, so much as is possible of course. But it’s as bespoke as you can make it for each company using it without a ground-up redesign for each repairer. 

All the while we had to retain the speed of entering calls, admining them and so on, which we largely did. But we also came up with a beter solution, allowing customers and clients to enter all then themselves online saving us the bother. 

These sorts of developments save boatloads of time for office staff. 

For the guys in the field we made it so that what they did, where they were and so on is fed back to the office in real time but we went further in a bid to reduce needless chase calls. 

The system can automatically send SMS messages out to customers so that, with no intervention at all on the part of the field tech, the customer gets told how far away they are and when they are likely to arrive. 

This is a game changer for cutting down on needless, pointless and wasteful time for everyone. 

I’m only skirting around some of the highlights here, of course; there’s way more to this and many more enhancements have been made specifically for the appliance repair industry that cut down calls, speed up processes and more to lighten the load on techs and office-based staff. 

OEM Service System

When we started work for Amica we took the bare bones of the Rapport system and altered it very heavily to be able to have a system that could take service calls from end users and distribute those to repair companies across the UK. All by multiple means. 

We also did some of the things mentioned previously in order to save time on the phones for staff such as online booking, auto-updates for customers and so forth. It reduced calls and gave customers a better experience, faster as well 

Rapport users (repair companies) info would flow back to Amica’s system in real time so, if a customer had a reason to call after a visit etc the info from the field tech was on the staff’s screen even before the customer had called in. Being that up to date was fantastic for the staff and saved a lot of time and calling back and forth. 

We linked that to a stock system we also designed in house so that even when parts were dispatched to the customer or repeirer the customer was updated by email or SMS, saving more calls. 

The whole thing about trying to save all these calls is multi-faceted but the main points are that it means your customer gets a better, faster more informed service and you need less staff to do a particular volume of work. So you look better and more professional, giving a superior service whilst saving money. 

It is all about efficiency. Making these systems more efficient and effective doesn’t just help the business, it also helps the customer also saving both time and money. 

Free Version & Prices

This was a big one, especially for small repair companies that are micro-businesses that do not have cash to lash out on expensive systems. We even had to make it affordable for single person businesses. 

We also had to make it scalable so that a low monthly cost was achievable for micro business and yet make it so that it could handle hundreds of calls a week for larger ones. Like I said before, no two are the same. 

We had more cost flexibility on the OEM systems. 

Originally the idea was to make the system available for free to the small repairers especially and we did have a free version for a time but, it proved not to be a viable option. After a time it became clear that there were costs involved in setting such a system up, maintaining it and so on so the free version couldn’t be done as we didn’t have the income to support it. 

Keep in mind, we did this to help the repairers, not gouge them. 

We managed to make it affordable though. Rapport is, if not the cheapest system about, it’s certainly one of them and I haven’t gone looking at what the competition does as I largely don’t care. You see Rapport was designed specifically for repairers here in the UK carrying out repair work to large appliances. Unlike other that are all too often a version of a systrem made for something else and shoehorned into doing whatever for field service. 

Your Cost

Think on this as, a lot of small repairers don’t as they’re great at fixing stuff and busy doing that but honeslty often no so great at business stuff…

How much is your time worth?

Consider this, if using Rapport saves you admin time, phone calls and so on then for most it is liable to be saving you about an houir or so a day. How much is that hour worth to you?

Given that Rapport, unless a large multi-technician version costs less than a coffee from Starbucks a day, we’d tell you it was a fantastic investment. 

It will get you back that time, give your customers a better service and make your life easier. 

Not bad at all for less than, in many cases, £1 a day. 

Of course you are free to look at other systems as well, we just like ours and sdo do our users, most all of them swear by it and love it. 

Industry Understood

The reason users love it is that the people that developed this system are in the industry, like myself have vast knowledge of it and we levderaged that to build a system that was tailored specifically to appliance field service. 

It wasn’t designed for other uses. It can of course be modified and used for other field service applications, naturally but at its very core it is designed for appliance repairers. 

And, it has been designed to save time and money in that arena at as low a cost as possible. 

You can find out more on the Rapport Website here and get a demonstration if you want to; I’d say it’ll be a bit of time very well spent doing so.