Technicians, engineers, and other technical specialists: at Mekano, clients find the right match. For more than 25 years, the company has been connecting independent technicians with clients in the industry. And the phone still plays a key role in this process: about 80 percent of all contact takes place over the phone. Specialists are sometimes scheduled months in advance. “There aren’t any technicians just sitting around at home, so to speak,” summarizes Marcel Paridaans, project manager at Mekano. But he finds taking notes during phone calls to be just about the most boring task there is. Moreover, information from calls made on the go didn’t always make it into the CRM. So he asked Voys to set up a smarter way to document these calls.

In the office, the phone rings all day long. Twenty, sometimes twenty-five calls a day are not uncommon. These include clients looking for someone, freelancers who are almost available, or people who just want to finalize a few details. After each call, the most important details then had to be entered manually into the CRM.

With the consultants, however, the exact opposite was true. “They’re basically always on the road,” Marcel explains. Scattered across the country, they call the same clients and freelancers from their cars. But what they discussed didn’t always make it into the system. “Then we end up calling each other in quick succession with the same questions.”

And that’s quite inconvenient in this market. “If someone says, ‘My contract expires in three weeks,’ then of course I need to know that right away.” That gave Marcel an idea: if that information is already part of the phone call, why would you still have to record it manually afterward?

Recording calls and having them transcribed was already possible with existing solutions, but that wasn’t what Marcel was looking for. “We didn’t want a transcript of a call, but rather a short and clear summary with the key action items.” And that information didn’t need to be manually saved somewhere afterward—it had to be automatically assigned to the correct contact in the CRM.

To meet that need, Voys brought together various components. The calls are routed through Ascend and recorded there. BumiCom handles the transcription and analysis. Together with the provider of Mekano’s CRM software, Voys set up a custom integration so that the summary is automatically added to the correct contact record.

According to Marcel, that summary is usually limited to just a few lines. “I very rarely come across summaries that are longer than five lines.” At the bottom are the action items for the client, the office staff member, and the independent contractor.

That mainly saves work after a phone call. “You hang up and get right back to your work,” says Marcel. “You don’t have to cut a call short because you’ll need to set aside another five minutes afterward to follow up.” Making fewer calls isn’t an option: “We actually make a lot of calls because we simply don’t want to do it by email.”

Mekano hasn’t yet measured exactly how much time the automation saves. Marcel estimates the savings at 45 minutes per day per office staff member. With four employees, that amounts to roughly three hours per workday. “That really adds up.”

Marcel doesn’t think that the time saved needs to be immediately filled with other work. “We’re not the kind of company that says, ‘All your hours have to be completely packed.’” And what if a task adds little value? “If a task isn’t enjoyable, you have to ask: Is it necessary? And if so, can we automate it?”

The project began with one clear goal: to reduce the time the office staff spent documenting calls. As the project progressed, it became clear that the same solution could also add value for the consultants, who make many calls while on the road.

It was precisely during those conversations that information used to get lost. What was discussed with a client or independent contractor on the go was by no means always entered into the CRM. By routing mobile conversations through Ascend as well and incorporating them into the same workflow, relevant information is now automatically recorded.

“That was actually just a bonus,” says Marcel. “But that bonus turned out to be so significant that it really got us excited.”
He doesn’t complicate his assessment of the solution any further. “The product solution simply works. That’s what matters most.”