BACKGROUND: Insight is a global technology solutions provider that offers the technologies and expertise to help business and public sector clients lower costs and gain efficiencies across the IT environment. Insight combines world-class hardware and software provisioning, global software capabilities and IT consulting to offer a single source for diverse technology solutions. Insight is ranked number 484 on Fortune magazine’s 2009 “Fortune 500” list.
PLATFORM: Windows XP.
PROBLEM SOLVED: Insight sells service contracts in conjunction with hundreds of thousands of products sold each year. But managing an effective maintenance contract business presents complex challenges. Service360 gives Insight a comprehensive Web platform upon which to track service and warranty contract lifecycles. In addition, the solution provides a value-add to clients, allowing them to take command of the process of managing service contracts for their business-critical IT assets. By aligning the warranty and service contracts with associated products, Service360 gives our sales teams a pulse on our customers’ technology refresh needs.
PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: The MaintenanceNet Service360 portal is segregated into distinct sales divisions, with features that meet each group’s unique sales, management and reporting requirements. Insight sales representatives across these divisions track expiring service contracts and identify new service and technology refresh sales opportunities. The product provides us with automated, proactive email notifications in advance of expiring service contracts; reporting capabilities for tracking performance, and visibility into relationships across contracts, assets, partners and end customers for improved communication and management.
STRENGTHS: Service360 appealed to Insight because it represented much more than a supply chain portal: it incorporates data mining and integration capabilities that enable us to achieve true BI. With better business intelligence, we are able to provide greater value to our clients while improving our overall service contract and technology refresh sales.
WEAKNESSES: Service360 pulls data from multiple data sources (originating from the manufacturer/supplier, the customer or Insight), and then aggregates this data, ultimately presenting - in the Web-based portal - exactly what has been sold. Our only complaint is that it does not offer the capability for us to upload our own data yet. At the same time, MaintenanceNet has assigned Insight a dedicated data services team member who updates/uploads the data displayed in the portal for us.
SELECTION CRITERIA: We researched the options and Service360 is the only product we found that provides a dynamic, all-in-one solution for uncovering service contract opportunities and managing, tracking and expediting service sales. We saw that we could use it to manage the service contract lifecycle in such a way that we could realize substantial improvements in service sales and also in customer satisfaction. By managing our service contracts more effectively, we also increased our interaction with customers, which has ultimately allowed us to better anticipate their needs.
DELIVERABLES: Service360 gives Insight several deliverables, including the integration of multiple sources of customer, supplier and sales data into a single system of record. The Web-based portal allows our sales teams and end customers to quickly and easily view service contract lifecycles and gain other insightful information. Service360 also provides BI reporting tools to facilitate a check and balance of Insight’s internal systems against its suppliers and to allow us to produce complete, customized audits of assets sold. Another deliverable from MaintenanceNet was the branding of Service360 for Insight as a value-added tool specifically geared toward improving customer satisfaction.
VENDOR SUPPORT: MaintenanceNet conducted a number of valuable on-site training sessions. In addition, they have always been available by phone and via email, and their support teams have been extremely responsive. We consider MaintenanceNet as an important partner and Service360 as a vital contributor to our business.
DOCUMENTATION: Although the documentation is excellent, we have found that the Service360 user interface is very easy to use, making it possible for our sales teams to put the product to work, without the need for extensive hands-on training. MaintenanceNet has also gone out of its way to provide documentation specific to each type of user, since functionality differs for out internal teams versus our end customers accessing the system.
MaintenanceNet Service360
MaintenanceNet, Inc.
5963 La Place Court, Suite 300
Carlsbad, CA 92008
(760) 496-7564
Product reviews are customer testimonials. We thank the author of this review for taking the time to share his or her expertise.
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