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UCG accelerates growth in New Zealand with Snap Support's real-time field support and collaboration platform

UCG accelerates growth in New Zealand with Snap Support's real-time field support and collaboration platform

Universal Communications Group: Expanding fast in New Zealand to keep Kiwis connected

UCG provides innovative fulfilment solutions to the telecommunications sector by providing their clients with a full turnkey project starting from network design, through construction, and then ongoing field operations and maintenance services. Back in 1995, UCG started as a small Australian company. Today, with over 400 employees and around 900 delivery partners across New Zealand, Australia and the Philippines, UCG is still setting new benchmarks for innovation, experience and expertise.

UCG entered the New Zealand market in 2014 in partnership with Chorus, specializing in design and construction for multi-family housing (apartment buildings) to connect them up to ultra-fast broadband.arrived!

The Growth Challenge: Onboarding and Supporting a Fast Growing Team of Technicians

In order to support this fast growing business in New Zealand driven by the need for new fiber network connections, UCG needed to onboard and deploy more delivery partners. This meant recruiting technicians who were not very experienced in all aspects of UCG's portfolio as well as training existing partners to work on new types of jobs. UCG's team needed a better way to connect the front line force of technicians to field managers, design teams and back office administration staff to provide them instant support. In many cases, field managers ended up driving to job sites to provide help, but in cases where there were none the technician would have to reschedule customer appointments and make multiple trips to complete the job.

Roger McArthur, CTO of UCG, needed a versatile remote support and collaboration solution to better guide the field and to keep up with the company’s growth in New Zealand.

The Goal: Turn Outstanding Service into a Competitive Advantage

Completing a fiber optics survey, design or connection project requires careful coordination among the building owner, UCG team and Chorus (the telecom infrastructure company). Roger realized that in order to keep up its growth in New Zealand and to become one of the major players in the market, it was not sufficient to just complete jobs. UCG's future success would also be dependent on using innovative solutions to complete the jobs faster and with the highest quality to ensure customer satisfaction of both the building owner and Chorus as well as attaining increased profit margins for UCG.

UCG also needed better ways to capture job completion details and submit to the telecom company for approval. Using multiple applications and manual processes for report submissions meant longer lead times and payment delays. All issues that needed to be addressed and fast!

The Solution: SnapSupport's Real-time Field Support and Collaboration Platform

After evaluating a few video based remote assistance solutions, such as RescueLens from LogMeIn, UCG realized it needed a more versatile solution that met all their field support needs

Roger turned to SnapSupport, a real-time field support solution designed specifically for collaboration and instant help, to power UCG's Virtual Field Manager concept (VFM). VFM empowers field technicians to resolve issues faster by availing the correct information and guidance in real-time from experts. When a delivery partner has a question at the job site, he just takes a picture, annotates the picture with additional information and sends it. The picture is automatically tagged with the jobsite address and the question is assigned to the right UCG manager or expert based on the job location and issue type. If the question is not answered within a specified interval, it is escalated to the next person in the hierarchy.

A field service manager or expert gets notified and can provide support immediately from his mobile or computer via SnapSupport's chat interface. The expert can mark up the picture sent by the technician to clarify and provide immediate resolution. When required, a video call can be initiated right from the app so that the expert or manager can see the job site live and provide on-the-spot assistance.

SnapSupport-UCG Case study

Using SnapSupport's flexible templates, technicians submit job completion and quality reports, which can be immediately viewed and approved by managers. The manager can download the report as a PDF for submission to Chorus with a single click. SnapSupport also offers UCG a way to connect directly with Chorus to share reports which completely eliminates the need for manual email approvals.

The Results: More Jobs Completed per Day; Faster Onboarding of Delivery Partners and High Customer Satisfaction

Using SnapSupport, a team of 50+ field service managers and in-house experts facilitate field activities of more than 600 delivery partners. The field team uses SnapSupport to get instant feedback and to submit job completion/inspection reports. Most questions are answered immediately and closed the same day.

UCG case study results snapsupport

SnapSupport has enabled UCG to achieve its goal of scaling their growing business by onboarding delivery partners quickly and supporting them for faster completion of jobs. The platform has also enabled UCG to collaborate effectively with its clients for better coordination and faster approvals of completion reports.

ABOUT Universal Communications Group

Universal Communications Group (UCG) is one of Australia's and New Zealand's leading suppliers of a range of broadband design, cabling and construction services, particularly for next generation cable networks.

For 20 years, we have provided innovative fulfillment solutions to the telecommunications sector while helping our clients' connect their networks to their building and business systems. Over time we have counted among our clients some of Australia's and New Zealand's largest and most respected blue-chip telecommunications operators.

ABOUT SnapSupport

SnapSupport is a fast growing Silicon Valley company that provides a real-time field support platform powered by mobile and IoT. SnapSupport’s mobile companion app is used by field teams to collaborate with their in-house experts or leaders using various collaboration tools such as chat, live video and Google Glass to resolve issues fast. The app can interface with connected equipment and pull data in real-time for troubleshooting purposes.

SnapSupport also enables field staff to perform asset and quality control inspections using highly configurable templates, and manage approvals and reporting.

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