Okdesk-Wialon integration increases customer support efficiency (Updated)

Today, we’ll be talking about the integration which allows the automation of the customer support service and new options for communication in the telematics industry. Find the details below.

Problem

Most telematics service providers don’t have any system for the clients’ requests tracking and their further automated processing. This conclusion was made by Okdesk, the developer of the system for tracking and managing clients’ requests, after the survey they conducted.

If there is no track of customer support requests, they are very likely to be lost, deadlines – to be missed, and users – to be dissatisfied with the quality of the services provided. This will definitely affect both a service provider and a client.  

But the customer support platform itself doesn’t solve these problems. While processing the end-user requests, each Wialon partner sooner or later faces even more specific issues.

Let’s say, yet another client contacts your customer support. To help them solve their issue, you need to check which device or unit is being referred to. To do so, you use Wialon, or look through the internal documentation, or clear up all the details with the client spending additional time.

The more end-users, units, and devices the service provider caters for, the more time the technical support spends on collecting the necessary information. Thus, there is less time left for the request processing, the labor costs increase, while the failure to react quickly in a critical situation can mess up the relations with the client.   

Instead, it would be great to have all the data in one place and find everything you need to help the client in just a few clicks. The best solution would be the synchronization of the client’s connected units and devices with the technical support platform. It would allow you to get an idea of the client’s hardware and link the current request to the specific device or devices.

As you can see from the results of the survey conducted by Okdesk among telematics companies, the most popular option is the ability to register the request in the technical support right from the interface of the monitoring system. 

This is exactly what Okdesk from Moscow offers. So far, this solution has been successfully implemented by Wialon-Service, Shturman, Monrans, Navion, Navitrade, Galaktika Glonass, Kainglobe Telematics, etc. With Helpdesk by Okdesk, Wialon partners can provide technical support for their customers’ fleets, sensors, and other equipment.

Solution

The company developed an integration with Wialon that synchronizes the list of vehicles and sensors installed in these vehicles with the list of units and devices in Okdesk, the customer support platform. Now the client has just to add new entities to Wialon (units or sensors), and they are automatically imported to the customer support system. Note that you can configure the types of synchronized sensors. It allows the user to avoid the import of information unnecessary for the technical support processes. On top of that, the integration makes it possible to collect data from several Wialon accounts simultaneously.

A Wialon account corresponds to the company card in Okdesk, while a unit is the service object there. In company cards, the user can configure the parameters of synchronization with Wialon.

The data is being synchronized every three hours. 

All the information on the client’s vehicles and devices is kept in Okdesk, as well. The service provider technical support can use it while linking the request to a specific unit and sensor.

End-to-end clients’ authentication

When working on the solution, the developers also added the ability of authentication in Okdesk right from the Wialon interface. It was made for users’ convenience as per Okdesk’s statistics the client portal is one of the most popular ways of submitting a request for technical support. Thus, if the user is already logged in Wialon, they don’t have to enter their Okdesk login and password but can just click the ‘Go to Okdesk’ button.

How it works

In Wialon, users can create their own apps. The simplest example of this is the link with parameters (for example, user name in Wialon and an authentication code) that is displayed in the Wialon interface. Through this information, Okdesk will find out that the user who has just used this link is in the contacts database and logged in to Wialon at the same time. The check is complete, and the user finds himself in Okdesk in one click and can submit a request or update previous requests right away. 

The solution works both for Wialon Hosting and Wialon Local. In the documentation, you’ll find more details about end-to-end authentication and other subtle aspects of Okdesk and Wialon integration.

Step-by-step guide on how to synchronize Okdesk and Wialon

Results

This solution takes the company’s customer service to a whole new level, as the technical support department gets:

• up-to-date information on the clients’ vehicles and sensors – there’s no need to dig into which devices of this client you are responsible for, if the vehicle is under the service agreement, etc. All this data is available in the company card;
• exclusion of the support of the hardware and the requests that are not covered by the service agreement;
• work efficiency increase: requests are processed rapidly, so a customer support specialist can resolve more requests per unit of time;
• access to all the statistics and the results of the customer support system for employees and top managers;
• end-user gets better and faster customer support service.

Yet, there is more to add. This integration has both short and long-term advantages. It gives the company's management an opportunity to analyze the major reasons for contacting technical support and make important business decisions based on this information.

For example, the frequent breakdowns of some devices with high labor costs spent on their repair are a good reason to stop the service support of such hardware and to recommend replacing both the device in question and the manufacturer in general.

Igor Grachev, CEO, Navitrade, shares his impressions:

“We’ve been using Okdesk for some time already as a part of the automation process of the service and after-sales support for various telematics hardware, including fuel level sensors. We were among the first to try this out-of-the-box integration with Wialon. 

The main goal of the integration was to get up-to-date information on the clients, their vehicles, terminals, and sensors in the customer support system, and connect the issues to the specific devices when getting new requests. Thus, we can get all the necessary statistics, including the one on the sensors which tend to break down more often than others.

So far, Okdesk and Wialon have 1,000 synchronized units and about twice more sensors. We plan on synchronizing the information on the rest of the units as well.” 

Prospects

The described Okdesk-Wialon integration is not the only possible way for these two systems to operate together. With Okdesk and Wialon (API and SDK) functionality, Wialon partners can develop other solutions for the business-specific tasks. For example, now they can automatically register a request binding it to a certain vehicle based on the notifications right from the monitoring system. You can discuss this integration and its other use scenarios on the forum.

Contact us at marketing@gurtam.com if you have an interesting Wialon-based solution or project. We’d love to share them on our blog or add them to our marketplace.