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Tracking Quality of Service |
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Technology has introduced a better way to assure that portable toilets are serviced correctly: the digital camera. Yes, the digital camera has now made it possible to verify that service is done correctly and obtain additional billing for customers who abuse the units.
Here is how it works. You give a digital camera ($100.00) to the service route driver who, after completing the service, takes a picture of the cleaned unit, making sure the date/time stamp is turned on in the camera and the serial number of the unit is visible. Good locations for the serial number include the front or top of the tank or underside of the toilet seat. In any case, the letters have to be large enough to be readable in the picture.
When the driver returns to the office, plug the camera in and download the images to a folder tree that starts with the route number and route day e.g. route 3 day Wednesday could be “3_Wednesday” and has a new folder inside the route/day folder for each date year_month_day so that November 10, 2002 is 2002_11_10. If you look at your computer with the Explorer, you first see a list of route/days and if you click in the folder you will see a sorted list of every service route in date order. Then when you look in that folder, you see a list of image files in the date and time order that the route was run. When you look at the images in the folder with any standard PC picture viewer, they come up in the order that the route was run with each picture showing the completed service and the serial number of the unit. After a reasonable time period has passed, just delete the older folders.
Now comes the good part, when the driver encounters a unit he cannot service, he/she takes a picture showing the locked gate or cement truck parked in front of the unit. If you want to invest in a camera phone and email, he can take the picture with it, email it to the office and the office can print the image and paper mail it, or email it to the customer so they know why the unit could not be serviced. Talk about quality of service! Better yet, when the driver finds an abused unit, you know the ones with graphitti, clothing and beer cans in the tank, he takes a before and after picture. Include the pictures with the invoice for the extra cleaning charge. I am sure that when they see the before picture, the abuse of the phrase “normal use” in your Terms and Conditions will be clear. Yes, the driver could email the picture of the abused unit to the office and the office could have already called the customer and sent the invoice before the driver returned.
By the way, if you want to do away with the camera and just use the camera phone, you need to use Microsoft Outlook so that, as the images are received, they are routed to the correct mail box. You can then either leave them there and delete them after a few months or export them to the folders as we described. There are lots of issues associated with using premises-based email, like viruses, phone charges for sending images and expensive camera phones to mention a few. On the up side, wait a year or two, and the phone camera will not only be inexpensive enough to use, it will also include GPS so you can prove the location of the unit in addition to the date/time stamp.
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