Premier SVC saves money, improves customer service and streamlines business processes with RouteShoot

Hi All,

For anyone engaged in business, you will know how difficult it is to generate good content - feedback from customers, white papers, endorsements etc. With that in mind we have to say a very, very big thank you to Chris Bartlett of Premier Utility Services for taking the time to respond to a few questions we posed to him about his experiences with RouteShoot. We are extremely pleased to receive his endorsement and would like to share his answers with our blog readers everywhere...

What does Premier SVC do?

Premier’s corporate office is located in Hauppauge, New York with over 800 employees operating in 22 states across the United States. Proud member of the Willbros Group (NYSE:WG), Premier provides various services to our utility partners across the country. Some of the many services provided include Damage Prevention (Underground Utility Locating), Gas Services (Gas Leak Detection, Atmospheric Corrosion Inspections, Corrosion Testing), Electrical Services (Contact Voltage Testing, Electrical Inspections, SF6), Emergency Services (Storm Support, Work Contingency Planning) GIS Services (GIS Mapping & Management Programs, Asset Inventories) and Speciality Services (Vacuum Excavation, Ground Penetration Radar, Flagging and Traffic Control).

What issues were you looking to address?

Prior to Premier engaging RouteShoot there were several issues we were faced with using our previous video capture system. A few of the major concerns were exponential disk storage growth in a 17 month period (30TB’s), accurate search functionality, ease of use for our field technicians and most importantly the delivery of video footage to our clients in a timely manner. Choosing RouteShoot as our video content management system has helped us lower our total per technician costs. RouteShoot has also allowed us to scale this deployment very quickly to over 480 remote technicians.

Has RouteShoot helped you to improve service to your clients?

Since deploying RouteShoot at Premier we have been able to meet all client contractual requirements with regards to providing field video footage. If a damage does occur in the field our clients now know they will have the video footage in their hands very very quickly.

Have you achieved any tangible savings or efficiencies?

Prior to RouteShoot, technicians were deployed with a laptop, digital camcorder and other devices to capture field video footage. Deploying RouteShoot on smartphone devices to each technician not only lowered our capital expenditures per technician it has also increased productivity per technician. Before RouteShoot members of the IT staff spent countless hours searching for video files on local laptops, network servers and camcorder devices. Now, when a request comes in from a client or supervisor, a member of the claims department can easily search the system and retrieve the video in seconds. We no longer spend our days wondering if we will locate the video we are looking for when a request comes in. Moving the video management system to the cloud has also freed up valuable IT staff resources to do other things, instead of managing on premise hardware. It has also allowed me to spend more time on things that help technology assist the business in generating revenue as opposed to spending my time worrying about if we will find a video.

What features in RouteShoot have been particularly useful to you?

RouteShoot’s ease of use, accurate and effective search functionality has been extremely beneficial to both Premier and its clients. The ability to email a link to the videos to anyone with an internet connection has been just awesome and blows our clients away. We have been able to quickly locate a video and re-route field technicians to follow up in a timely manner on numerous occasions.

Have any other aspects of your business benefitted?

RouteShoot now provides us with a level of reporting we just simply did not have previously. The ability to see the footage in real time has been a tremendous improvement to our QA controls and processes. RouteShoot has also enabled us to provide better training programs to our technicians and provides us with the tools necessary to follow up with technicians much more frequently than in the past. The ability to see the technicians GPS path while shooting video has also enabled us to show clients we are accurately documenting the work we are doing for them.

Chris Bartlett
IT Manager

Premier Utility Services, LLC
100 Marcus Blvd Suite #3
Hauppauge, NY 11788