for Software and Services Companies
Quantum is designed to help you manage your business in a number of ways, each of which contributes to maximising income, reducing costs, making the most of your available resources, and tightening up all your processes.
Here are a few reasons why Quantum's unified suite of integrated modules can do more for you (than the assortment of basic tools and custom code you're probably using now!):
Comprehensiveness
Time is of the essence
The most valuable resource at any services organisation's disposal is its employees' time. Understanding how that is being used is the key to tight and profitable control.
Quantum gives you multiple logical points at which to record time and costs, to make it easy to capture time spent on all types of activities and avoid leakage of billable hours.
As well as providing (reviewable) data suitable for input into billing systems, these time transactions are also the basis for providing dashboard views of project progress, not to mention giving you a handle on the other profit-consuming activities that use up the precious resource.
At-a-glance monitoring of active projects
Knowledge - it really is Power
A vitally important aspect of product lifecycle management is the issue of "Knowledge" - how to capture it, how to manage it. and how to make it available to all who can benefit from it.
Informal knowledge-sharing may work for a small team and a small client base, but as they both expand, more reliable methods of leveraging your team's hard-won experience are called for.
Quantum solves this problem by capturing essential know-how as part of the normal call-handling process. Its Solution Database is a searchable repository for storing everything known about your products and the environments they operate in, with all fixes, workarounds, technical bulletins and web links properly associated and indexed. Even when workable resolutions have not been explicitly added as Solution entries, Quantum can still find them in call logs, to assist staff when a similar issue re-occurs.
Perhaps the most important reason of all for having a repository like this is that by keeping all the information your people need in one place, they'll always know where and how to find it.
Processes that work
Along the growth path from inception to maturity, most companies need to constantly review the methods they use to ensure capable and consistent execution of core business processes. Without a solid structure and automated support, the more complex work streams involving multiple people and many different tasks often produce inconsistent results, especially in system development.
Quantum's Workflow/Change manager can help here, because it lets you create repeatable task sequences, with provisions for automated approval procedures, reversions, escalations etc. You can mix serial and parallel tasks, add unlimited documentation and other attachments, and always have total visibility of where each project is up to, whether large or small.
Communication - keeping everyone "in the loop"
Survey after survey confirms that a key indicator in User Satisfaction ratings for IT support is the issue of supplier communicability - how easy or difficult it is for a customer to find out what's happening to their requests.
It is essential, therefore, to employ a service support system that keeps all stakeholders "in the loop" as a by-product of handling requests, whether they are customer personnel or your own staff or associates. Quantum's Messaging and Notification sub-system automatically sends many different types of message, all based on customisable templates, using the recipient's preferred communication method for each type.
Another very useful component of Quantum's communication arsenal is its internal in-call messaging and alert system, (which is in addition to the standard e-mail interface) so that important matters cannot "slip through the cracks" by getting lost amidst the clutter of general mail traffic.
Q-Web Customer Portal
Quantum is available in both client/server and web browser form, the latter giving your staff access from anywhere, any time.
Also provided is the Q-Web Customer interface, which lets you build your own interactive customer web portal into your web site. This is very customisable, so you can give your end-users a tailored set of facilities including call logging and tracking, knowledge base and FAQ searching, and some basic reporting. Customers appreciate the convenience and autonomy that this kind of access give them, not to mention the reduction in the number of telephone interruptions for your staff.
