ETRANET Group is one of the largest providers of POS and EFTPOS support and maintenance services in Croatia, where we manage our own Contact Center and multi-tier Help Desk, offering on-site delivery, installation, education and servicing of both purchased and rental EFTPOS/POS devices and fiscal cash registers – not only on the continent, but also on all of Croatia’s many islands.
We prepare customer devices, load applications and operating system, performing firmware update and key injection in a safe environment; applying customer branding, packaging, and insertion of supporting material such as manuals and quick guides.
We deliver and install your device – we are locally present in Zagreb, Split, Rijeka, Osijek, Bjelovar, Poreč, Zadar and Dubrovnik, which allows us to quickly deliver and install equipment at your premises.
We educate your sales staff to take advantage of all the functionalities of the ordered solution, regardless of whether it is EFPTOS or POS device or fiscal cash register.
We provide first and second level Help Desk through our contact center supporting clients and their end users. Issues are addressed by our experts in several levels of assistance, depending on the nature of the problem and the resources needed to solve it.
We provide device maintenance and servicing, covering the entire territory of Croatia, including the islands, with our strategically placed local service centers.
We provide rental of EFTPOS/POS systems and equipment. The rental service includes the entire offer under the ‘fiscalization – turnkey’ system. It consists of a cash register, a software package and, if necessary, an internet connection for mobile devices. In addition, customer support is available, 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, with the maintenance of the cash register at your location with a deadline of intervention within 24 hours, and secured service and replacement fiscal cash register. Our intervention team covers the entire territory of the Republic of Croatia, including the islands, and the intervention period can be arranged in a shorter response period for an additional fee.
We sat down with our Saša Popović from Field Services Management to take a closer look at how ETRANET Groups provides EFTPOS/POS support and maintenance across Croatia.
Q: Could you walk us through how ETRANET Group provides support and service for its clients and their users across Croatia?
A: Our Field Support and Service Technicians team is currently 18 strong, with technicians distributed all over Croatia in our local support and service centers in Zagreb, Split, Rijeka, Osijek, Bjelovar, Poreč, Zadar and Dubrovnik.
We tailor our presence and numbers to our clients, so naturally we augment our numbers accordingly. For instance, most technicians are in Split and Zagreb (4 each), supporting our very large and long-standing client OTP bank – they have a major clientele in the Split-Dalmatia County, with Zadar and along the entire coast following suit.
One of our biggest competitive advantages is constant, year-round coverage of the whole territory of Croatia, including the islands. We cover all islands and treat them the same way as all users, and we do it in the shortest possible time. For instance, we cover Dubrovnik but also have a technician stationed on the island of Korčula, who cover Pelješac, Mljet, Lastovo and the surrounding towns and islands.
With our significant support contracts for Hrvatski Telekom’s Mini Fiscal Cash Register and our own Billy brand of fiscal cash registers, we’ve put emphasis on supporting fiscalization which is the strongest during the summer season and on the seaside – thus we have technicians in Poreč covering Istria and people in Rijeka and Zadar in addition to Split.
Luckily, in Zagreb the work is predictably equally distributed throughout the year, which is also the case in Bjelovar and Osijek.
Q: What do the technicians do in the field?
A: Technicians visit each user’s location, perform installations, deinstallations, device replacements (interventions) and minor repairs that can be done at the end client’s location. Also, if necessary, we can provide additional training for users or new employees to work on POS devices or cash registers. By reserving the time to educate end users on site we increase customer satisfaction and reduce the number of subsequent calls to our Help Desk. This is why our service and support are consistently rated among the top in Croatia, as well as often warmly recommended by existing users to others.
Q: You’ve already mentioned OTP bank as an example of a very large client you support – can you tell us more about the profile of clients/end user of ETRANET’s field support services?
A: Let me just focus on OTP bank again, who are a great example of layers of support we provide. So, one layer is the support we provide to OTP bank as our primary client, but we also support in the field all of OTP bank’s own clients as end users of EFTPOS/POS devices. With their end users such as Ribola grocery store on the Adriatic Sea, Bakmaz retail stores in Zadar and Jadrolinija for ferry tickets – that’s quite a wide variety of specific demands on our devices and field support.
We also have large users who use our ticketing solution for ticket sales and validation in buses (Autoturist Samobor, Pleso prijevoz, Čazmatrans). One of our other major clients is the courier service GLS, which has a POS device in every delivery vehicle.
Finally, with Hrvatski Telekom comes a really varied segment of small and midsize merchants, restaurants, taxi services, and stands, parking, tourist transportation by boat, rental of sunbeds and umbrellas, hairdressing and beauty salons, and many more.
Q: That sound like potentially a lot of devices to come through field support monthly…?
A: Indeed. We have over 20,000 devices under maintenance every month – that’s in total, preparing new devices and installation, repositioning of devices at various client locations, servicing, and replacements.
Q: And what about how many interventions (just servicing and repairs at customer premises) do you have per month?
A: We number in the hundreds of interventions per month, with peak periods starting right about this time of the year with the coming summer months and tourist season.
Q: What does the support look like in the field during the summer season?
A: Field support in the season is at times quite chaotic, with traffic jams and often waiting hours to board the ferry. During the tourist season everyone is in maximum urgency mode everything must be done immediately but given that most of our employees have been working this job for many years, they know how to handle the chaos of tourist season and we somehow manage to fit 25 hours of work in a 24-hour day (laughs). Again, good planning and distribution of local support and service center areas helps a lot.
Q: Is there anything that you do in the field that is specific to ETRANET Group?
A: Well, there are a lot of companies that sell fiscal cash registers, but they don’t offer field service at all, doing everything by courier service and so-called self-installation packages. In practice, that means they offer neither installation nor onsite service and training. In contrast to this, we at ETRANET Group arrive on location with a ready-to-use device and train end users to use it. We work 7 days a week and are extremely quick in the event of an intervention, i.e., a device failure, and as a rule we remedy the issue within 24 hours.
Additionally, we can offer tailored field support for large clients and especially events. For example, we covered the IN Music festival with 5 technicians who were at the festival all night for the duration (3 nights) and were there to provide immediate onsite technical support for festival employees in the event of any malfunction of the POS device.
On a similar note, some ten years ago with fiscalization starting in Croatia we’ve successfully rolled out around 4,000 fiscal cash registers in the field on a very short notice. This was at a time when these devices were unknown to end users, so we’ve put much emphasis on educating end users at delivery. For this occasion, in order to fulfil the contract, we’ve rapidly scaled up our support numbers to over 100 technicians, help desk and training specialists.
Q: This is ETRANET Group’s Field Support now – what are your plans for the future?
A: We in Field Support always closely follow development in the business units we support. Thus, we are preparing to support our own solution for card acceptance which is in development. Also, ETRANET Group’s solutions for ticketing in passenger transport and electronic shelf labels solution for retail stores are growing rapidly, so we are ramping up localized support for those end users spread across Croatia.
