It is an exciting time for KloudGin. Launched with a simple but powerful mission to deliver information to workers where and when they need it, we quickly attracted a variety of enterprise and utility customers, who are now seeing increased value from their optimized processes associated with managing aging infrastructure, customer experience and worker productivity.
We knew that organizations were looking for the best possible solution for their workers in the field, as they realize that their work output is typically the first-line interface with their customers. To make it as straightforward as possible for the worker, ideally one solution was required for this interface. One solution to combine long and short cycle field service, asset and inventory management, customer portals, scheduling, mobile field execution and IoT integrations into one comprehensive industry-focused SaaS platform.
Field service and asset management products by big software vendors today are acquired as siloed products, built in an architecture that was designed in the late ’80s for the world then, and they just tried to make it better over time. At KloudGin, we built an architecture designed for today’s high performance mobile cloud computing and AI world with the core focus on making the life of field workers easy and building a modern, cloud-based, single-schedule optimization engine for all work (customer service and asset work) grounds up.
Having built our own single cloud platform for this connected approach and working with our customers to realize the benefits, the new exciting phase is that we can now accelerate this transformation even further, with recently secured investment of $8 million in Series A Round funding.
So, what does this mean in practice?
An evolving landscape
Industries are changing. Field service and asset management is changing. Being connected is a necessity, not a nice to have or the next evolutionary stage. It is required today, and our role is to provide organizations with the means to successfully make this digital transformation for themselves. Achieving a connected field service – and wider business operation – to ultimately enhance the customer experience they are delivering, and that customers, in general, are coming to expect.
We are delighted to be working with Cloud Apps Capital Partners in this transition because of their experience and depth of knowledge in cloud business application markets and from the very first conversation with them, they completely understood our vision and plans. They understand the complexity of the work, the supply chain, future business models in the world of smart distributed assets, and the mission-critical nature at the ground level.
It is great to have Andy Stinnes from Cloud Apps Capital Partners on the KloudGin board and together this is a great foundation to take the digital transformation and customer experience forward.
Digital Transformation – the Backbone of a Business
From the outset at KloudGin we knew that other solutions had been built and developed on old siloed technologies. The very nature of field service and asset management means that each day can bring a range of different work from planned-in, routine maintenance through to critical emergency callouts. Work is diverse from installing smart meters, responding to main breaks, in visiting oil platforms and wind turbines or in residential homes and office buildings. A variety of factors can affect a day’s schedule. As a result of this, different systems are often being used by organizations to manage the work, relying on these older technologies being patched together or operated in total silos. Asset work would generally be in a different system to field service, some products focus purely on sales rather than service elements, and short cycle work (i.e, a single-line repair) and long cycle projects (such as substation construction) would be separated. As a result of the systems being in silos, this also means that the work and the teams operate in different workflows and processes.
Ultimately, these silos make work for field crews more complicated than it needs to be and experience inevitably shows that this is not an efficient or productive way to work for the field-based teams or those in the broader business to optimize work. By eliminating these traditional information and process silos and focusing totally on engineering our own single platform to work together on this important last mile, we enable existing business models to transform in order to serve new market opportunities and combat competitive threats.
Combining field service management and asset management into a single, integrated cloud solution means a more optimized operation. Combined with a single mobile app for field crews to interact for all types of work and this digital transformation is becoming the backbone of the business. The underlying KloudPlatform (low-code, no-code) was built from the ground up to support rapid deployment. The single native mobile app technology eliminates the need to build custom mobile apps. The integration engine and adapters, elastic cloud storage and compute with a modern collaboration engine that enables control over performance, scalability and user experience across all layers. Coupled with a studio to configure across various lines of businesses and industries, make it really easy to use, deploy and eliminate vicious upgrade and patching cycles.
Enhanced Customer ExperienceÂ
It is not just the focus on the field crews and back-office teams that has brought about the KloudGin single platform, connected approach, but ultimately providing the best experience for the customer. This means keeping the customer, as well as back office and contractors, always fully connected with your business operations.
I always take the view that to understand customer experience, you must put yourself in the customer’s shoes. I didn’t need to do this recently as I was the customer in question as I had received a water bill that was higher than expected. I contacted customer service for the particular utility, which was not as easy as it could have been; I was on hold for longer than I would have liked to be before speaking with an advisor who told me somebody would be out within five days. I wasn’t then at home the time the field worker called, so I was left a note meaning the process had achieved nothing.
Often now customers will prefer to schedule the appointment 24Ă—7 directly themselves, so they choose a time and day to suit. They can then track the appointment, the time of arrival, the progress and provide feedback. A much better experience for the end user and without the need to contact a customer service representative at all in the process.
In addition to the benefits for the customer and the enhanced experience, the field worker will also have their single point of access to all previous customer job history, inventory, an understanding of what needs to be done before even arriving on site and any complications or quirks that may be essential or desirable to know. Making any job far more productive and efficient with a better outcome all round.
Looking to a Connected Future
Connecting customers, employees, contractors and assets is the core piece of what KloudGin achieves and with increasing customer pressure, a growing millennial workforce with a need for the latest technology, and an ever-increasing complexity of mission-critical work being carried out the need has never been greater.
We designed KloudGin for the worker who uses it most and kept it simple to implement and use, but the value our customers see is the true digital transformation the solution delivers to enhance their processes, customer experience and worker productivity.
It is an exciting time for KloudGin and to see for yourself how we can help with your business transformation, I invite you to schedule a free demo of the KloudGin platform today.
Take care,
Vikram Takru