Workforce Management Featured Article
TOA Technologies' ETADirect Receives Industry Accolade for Helping Advance Europe's Ambitious Smart Meter Initiative
Smart meters can go a long way to prevent energy wastage at residential and commercial buildings. But, not every property owner is willing to let a utility company install smart meters at their places. They are often concerned that the new technology might interfere with their privacy. Also, they are often skeptical about the economic potentials of smart mete installations. This typical mindset of the consumers, coupled with technical complexities relating to large scale deployments, make life harder for field service personnel and negatively affects the companies’ overall smart meter initiatives.
With an innovative use of field service management solutions, it is possible to overcome the challenge and win customers’ confidence. It comes as no surprise that in an effort to improve the efficiency of field service workforce, more and more companies are embracing these field management solutions. This year’s Smart Metering UK & Europe Summit reaffirms this trend by highlighting the importance of field service management solutions in the European utilities market, and specifically how it supports the smart meter initiative, which mandates the deployment of smart meters to 80 percent of European households by 2020. TOA won the award in the category of Smart Metering Service Provider 2013.
TOA Technologies (News - Alert), a cloud-based field service and mobile workforce management applications provider, is one of the companies to walk away with a European Smart Metering Award. TOA reportedly bagged this coveted award for demonstrating ETAdirect’s efficacy in advancing Europe’s smart metering initiative.
TOA Technologies' field service management solution, ETAdirect, has been designed to ease up the workforce scheduling and customer experience challenges typically associated with smart metering deployment. The company uniquely combines a customer-centric approach to the routing and scheduling features to create a unique SaaS (News - Alert)-based field service management solution.
The solution, according to its maker, not only helps deliver a superior customer experience, but also helps achieve true workforce optimization. This is expected to result in an increased productivity and reduced costs as well as enhanced customer satisfaction, TOA explained in a news release.
Sales director for TOA, Doug McCullen accepted the award on behalf of the company. McCullen commented: “The shift to smart metering represents both an immense challenge and an immense opportunity. For utilities, it means changing how utilities think about people, processes and technology – especially the field workforces and how they interact with customers. Winning this award underlines the impact that TOA Technologies' field service management expertise and technology will have on driving both a successful smart meter rollout and long-term improvements to utilities' field workforce operations and customer satisfaction.”
In recognition of the success of ETAdirect and TOA’s overall contribution toward the SaaS market, Montclair Advisors recently named TOA one of the SaaS Top 250 companies on its quarterly list.
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Edited by Brooke Neuman