Paragon helps Castelan deliver a ‘better’ customer care experience

Warranty, claims and customer care provider Castelan Group is using Paragon software to centralise the planning of its UK home service operation and manage the allocation of its mobile technician team.

The Paragon software schedules service calls for Castelan’s nationwide team of mobile technicians, enabling the company to improve the customer care experience it offers on behalf of the UK’s major high street retailers.

Castelan, previously Homeserve Warranties, provides furniture and electrical warranty and care packages to more than 1.5 million households.

With a team of over 80 service engineers carrying out home visits ranging from damage assessments to TV repairs and French polishing, Castelan wanted to streamline the routing and scheduling process, enhancing the overall efficiency of its technical service operations and in turn improving the company’s customer satisfaction levels.

It chose Paragon’s Multi Depot system with Here Map Content, enabling the company to plan the routes and schedules for its entire team of mobile technicians as a single planning task.

With each technician treated as a ‘depot’, the system is able to flex the depot boundaries automatically to take into account the availability of its technicians, and provide a higher level of route planning capabilities. This results in improved efficiency in a multi depot planning environment, says Castelan.

“We’re very happy with the support we get from Paragon,” said Lisa Harbison, network deployment coordinator at Castelan.

“Paragon’s support team helps us with software upgrades and to use our solution to address new business requirements as they arise.

“For example, we needed to incorporate the collection of spare parts from stores prior to the service engineers’ visits into our planning process. These collections are now routed through Paragon.”

William Salter, managing director of Paragon Software Systems, concluded: “Paragon Multi Depot has facilitated the switch to central planning for Castelan, providing the ability to share results and incorporate changes from other sites across the operation.

“Not only does this reduce planning time, it also improves visibility of the service schedule and gives the planning team added flexibility, helping Castelan to distribute the workload evenly between its service engineers.”