TomorrowNow Takes Steps to Ensure Rapid Response

Published: March 20, 2007

by Alex Woodie

TomorrowNow is best known as a third-party provider of technical support and maintenance to ERP suites, including J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Oracle. Now, the Texas company is touting an internally developed system that continuously monitors the Blackberries and other wireless handheld devices used by its technicians, to ensure that it responds to its clients' concerns in 30 minutes or less.

When one of TomorrowNow's customers enters a question or a request through the vendor's Web site, it kicks off a slew of processes taking place behind the scenes. The bulk of the work is handled by a help desk and technical support application built on top of the IBM Lotus Notes and Domino platform, using Java and .NET technology.

Now, the vendor is rolling out a new piece, called TomorrowNow Support Technology, that is designed to ensure that its tech support crew is in continuous contact with customer requests. The new technology, for which TomorrowNow has applied for a patent, monitors the availability of service engineers' handheld devices, including pagers, Blackberries, and smart phones, to ensure that emergency response equipment is working.

The new support technology also handles incident routing to ensure that customers' questions are quickly put in front of the TomorrowNow tech support specialist best qualified for that particular issue.

TomorrowNow claims it averages 10 minutes or less to respond to customers' questions. By contract, the vendor is required to respond within 30 minutes. In either case, the timeliness is much better than the 24-hour turnaround time most ERP software vendors offer, the vendor says.

"TomorrowNow's case routing and remote handheld monitoring systems ensure that the most experienced support engineers in the industry are also the most responsive," says Greg Nelson, TomorrowNow's CIO. "This technology can be beneficial to any organization where instantaneous diagnosis and real-time responses are crucial."

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