Cell phone useful tool in office-equipment workplace
A few decades ago, the world of the office-equipment service technician was sort of isolated and "out there." You used the customer's phone to call the office, see if a certain part was in stock or be dispatched the next call. Mobile communication was limited. Usually, if you wanted to converse with your service manager or a fellow tech about whether a machine needed a new power-supply board, you had to use the customer's phone.
Enter the cell phone, replacing the all that hassle with a sometimes-nagging immediacy. But cell phones are now an indispensable part of a copier dealer's sales workforce and modern service dispatching. The phones eliminate interrupting the person on a call with a question or more urgent assignment. With text messaging - sometimes from the service software itself - the tech is in communication with "home base," even if he or she is dispatched from home.
Now techs are often dispatched from their house the night before for the morning service call. They can receive new calls during the workday and cue the immediacy of them. And cellular phones allow techs to work across a territory while in contact with the network of fellow techs.
"The guys can call each other if they have a question or a problem," said Karen Schapley, vice president of service for Northern Business Systems, Mahwah, New Jersey, "as opposed to having to find out where the guy is and get the phone number for that person and, at that point, it might be long distance." That scenario, she added, also usually involved one person in the office ferrying messages back and forth.
In addition, if a tech is going to be late for a call, he or she doesn't have to tie up the customer's line. And on the road, if there is an accident or other emergency, the immediacy of cell phones can save not only business accounts, but also lives.
Unlike other industries, there is not the clampdown about using cell phones at work in most copier dealerships. Management usually keeps tabs enough on employees to discourage abuse. Salespeople in copier dealerships often have the employer participate in payment some way. The traditional method is to pay for "over" minutes or the company reimbursing the employee for company use of his or her private cell phone on the job.
Used correctly, the cell phones keep copier personnel working efficiently and in contact with other staff and customers. But cell phones in the workplace also bring questions about privacy and liability issues.
The design of cell-phone plans for office-equipment dealerships
Many office-equipment companies, like Schapley's, furnish cell phones to all the service technicians, give them a plan with so many minutes, including free mobile-to-mobile with other techs, and if they go over the maximum minutes, the employee pays the excess.
"We also put phones in the hands of our dispatchers and our service managers, as well, so whoever they need to call, those are free," Schapley said. Voice-messaging is part of the plan to allow dispatch in hard-to-reach areas.
On the sales side, Northern has everyone buy their own phone and they can get a portion reimbursed. That's similar to the plan by Laser Supply, Newton Square, Pa., which pays a portion of the airtime if the salespeople own their own phone. Salespeople reimburse the company if it's a company phone and too much airtime is personal, according to Laser Supply Co-owner Bob Melso, but that rarely becomes a problem.
On the service side, Laser Supply dispatches its techs from home. "They can log onto the system and see what their schedule is," Melso said. "We can dispatch by cell phone. We can send text messages directly from our service package."
The dispatch package allows the dispatcher to click on a place on a map and have the option of sending a text message by cell phone. If the tech is in the nearby neighborhood, it will give information such as the contact, address and phone no and the piece of equipment by text-messaging cell phone.
Cell phone is an asset for service, Melso said, "because we can non-verbally make people aware of calls when it's prudent to do that. We don't have to call them and say, 'Joe, are you going to be …' We can just do it without interrupting them."
All salespeople at DocuTEAM, Alpharetta, Ga., have cell phones, said Jim McCarter, president and owner, and techs also have cell phones for contact and paging.
"When a call comes into an account on a technician's territory, it's automatically downloaded into their cell phone by dispatch, so they literally know a call came in," McCarter said. "If they want to change the cue of a call, they can do so based on the severity of the call, based on what they know about their territory."
For the 14 techs at ASI Business Solutions, Ed Bates, systems operations supervisor at the Dallas dealership, said techs often use the cellular phone's ability to consult about a machine problem. Said Bates: "It's an open network. Everyone here is pretty tight-knit and everybody's been in the industry for years, so they'll have different approaches."
So cell phones are handy for sales, service, dispatch and management and most dealerships encourage their use. But in some situations, they can be a liability - a legal one.
Enroute, yakkety-yaking's a no-no
In the years before Motorola first perfected car radios that would run on automobile batteries and went through the complicated years of developing an antenna array, distractions were still present in automobiles - like eating while driving. But when automobile radios became more prevalent in the early '30s, immediately some people pointed out the hazards of tuning the radio while driving.
Imagine how upset those same people would be with vehicles with laptops, PDAs, DVDs and now radio upgraded to satellite radio. There are plenty of things for drivers to fiddle with - and distract themselves with - in addition to cell phones. Being realistic, most all drivers have messed with some of these devices while driving. That includes using cell phones in traffic jams or sometimes, - even when they know it's not a safe thing to do - answering or making a call while driving the vehicle.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) statistics show about 25 percent of crashes are due to distraction, but the NHTSA states cell phones don't cause more accidents than other forms of distraction. However, states such as New York and New Jersey and cities like Washington, D.C. forbid talking on a cell phone while driving. Companies use various means, such as "hands-free" answering or ear buds to answer calls in these places.
Studies have shown a driver's distraction from cell phones involves more than looking down to dial. The mental process that causes people to concentrate on telephone conversations also hampers a driver responding to visual cues. So the NHTSA, in its own research, does not think the array of hands-free On Star, Bluetooth or other audio-piping devices in newer vehicles make much difference in terms of preventing cell-phone accidents.
Whether the cell phone is more distracting than other devices, many office-equipment dealers discourage or prohibit use of cell phones while driving. It's for the safety of their employees, and it's a liability issue. Employees - and employers - have had lawsuits because it's suspected the cell phone was being used for business while an employee was driving and someone was harmed in an accident. Other industries have written instructions to employees not to use cell phones while driving and encourage them to opt for voice mail enroute instead.
But the way to handle this is still being mulled by many companies in the office-equipment industry. DocuTEAM's McCarter says they tell their staff not to drive and answer phones because of potential liability. "We have an issue, like everyone else does, with how much you allow people to drive and telephone at the same time, because there's liability there," McCarter said. "We really haven't taken a position as a company yet. We have discussed it with the whole company in terms of what we want to make sure that our people don't do -and that is to take their eye off the road and all that - but we know that happens."
Corporate-friendly cell use
Cell phone packages are corporate-friendly enough that sales and service people can get a package that allows the occasional personal call. Most of the people interviewed let their employees monitor it themselves. Most have packages that discourage frequent use of company cell phones for private use.
"We're not too sticky about that," Melso said. "For personal use, if they get a phone call every other day, that's fine, but if the technicians abuse it, we're going to pull it out of their pocket."
The cell phone has enabled more immediate service and enhanced the responsiveness of personnel in the workplace, even if it also brings corporate concerns with driving liability, privacy and personal use. But there are late adapters that are still not using cell phones. Bates says some local companies bring every tech into the office for the first assignment and still use pagers for dispatch, just like service years ago.
"When I started - I've been in it seven years - they used to notify us by pager," he said. "Someone would page you and say what you had to do. Then when you were done, you'd clear it and go to the next one."
Now a network of staff is a phone call away, even if you don't physically see them much. Northern dispatches from home, and Schapley said, in such circumstances, "we can go days and sometimes even weeks without even seeing the technician."
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