New Fork life Technology

Mike Agerbo: Many small businesses have their employees over a number of different locations. Today, we’re going to have a look at one such company Harding Forklift who has dispatch, sales, field technicians and many others and how they use technology to communicate with each other. Let’s have a look.

Phil Gimson: I’m Phil Gimson. I’m the sales manager here at Harding Forklift. I also have some general management duties and part of that is I look after the IT. Harding Forklift is a materials handling company. We sell service, rent and lease materials handling equipment. There are a lot of us that have been here a long time. I’ve been here 19 years. These people had been here well over 20 years. We’ve gel together as a team and we work really well together. We know each very well and it’s definitely a family atmosphere in the company here.

At Harding Forklift has been a Telus customer since it’s on site. We had Telus landlines originally and as the technology developed we moved on in the early 90s into having the cell phones and then as the technology came along with the microphones and the Blackberries and the PDA’s we’re now using most of those products in everyday business.

There’s more and more important today to be in constant touch with the customers. They are needing service and answers to questions it’s in instantly in today’s business environment. It’s imperative that the sales people on the road have instant access to their emails and messaging systems and Blackberries and PDA’s have work really well first in that regard and that has been a real benefit to everybody, costumers and to us as a service provider.

We found that we were spending a lot of times seating in traffic with the price of fuel and time and labor costs today. It was costing everybody way too much money. All of our field service technicians now carry microphones and that is their primary method of communicating back with dispatch and with the Fire’s department. They can stay in touch instantly with the mics system.

We’ve been really happy with the costumer’s service we’ve been getting from Telus. They’ve been creative in helping us address different problems that have come out all the time. We were having an issue where some phones were hardly using anytime. Another is we’re using way too much time. Telus put together a creative program where we could pull all the minutes so that the people that we’re getting over charge we’re now using the spare minutes from the phones that were not being used.

With all the Telus that helps us at Harding Forklift to achieved over the last number of years I would definitely suggest that any small business owner or manager take a look at what Telus has to offer.