Edenred Adopts SiteSeeing as a Tool to Audit and Monitor Ticket Car Website

More than 5,000 clients of Ticket Car, both carriers and companies with vehicle fleets, access an application of Fleet Management through the company's Web site on a daily basis. Auditing the process has brought safeguards for both users and the company.

Edenred, comprising the companies Ticket and Accentiv' Mimética, is a world leader in cards and vouchers for prepaid services. It has just adopted the SiteSeeing system for monitoring online applications from the viewpoint of the end user. SiteSeeing began its audit within Edenred from Ticket Car by monitoring the performance and response time of the fleet management application, and the company will probably extend the service to other products. According to Geraldo Spinelli, associate director of Card Technology for Latin America, Edenred, being audited and monitored by an outside company gives guarantees for the two ends of the business. "With a monitoring solution that reports the point of view of the of the end user, we are dealing with truth and perception about our client and we have precise parameters to make adjustments and thus meet expectations. For us, it's kind of a trustee, an Ombudsman," he says.

It all started with Ticket Car, one of Ticket's products, aimed at controlling fleets, which includes supply management and maintenance services. According to the company, this product reduces, on average, 20% of the fleet costs, facilitating the control of vehicle expenses. Ticket Car currently has about 5,000 client companies and a provider network of 10,000 outlets.

Ticket Car's operating system is very similar to "Ticket Restaurante", which is well known for most people in Brazil. Companies that hire the service receive cards that enable the vehicle supply or fleet management, in addition to having a wide provider network. Watts is the world platform behind this system, a complete management application developed internally by the competent team of IT and business of Edenred's Ticket Car. "Through this application, our customers manage and maintain their vehicles, among other things. Everything is done online and in real time. This is a significant market differentiator for Ticket,” Spinelli describes.

Access to this application is made through the site www.ticketcar.com.br. After logging in, fleet administrators can access the web system, view the spending status per vehicle, set parameters for the use of cards (for example, restricting use on weekends), limit the amounts of transactions, limit the type of merchandise, among other things; as well as request new cards, lock and unlock cards, group and manage limits and credit, and manage costs through reports. "When a driver supplies one of the vehicles of the fleet with the Ticket Car card anywhere in the country, the company knows about it instantly. And that expense is computed real time, so that the company has control over when, where, how many gallons and how the driver spent in that petrol station," Spinelli said.

Executives point out that this application is the only gateway to Ticket Car's services and therefore it is considered mission critical for the business. "Access to that application is done via web and therefore it needs to be 100% available to the user," says Sergio Belmonte, Project and Card Technology Manager. Spinelli gives more subsidies to establish the criticality of the application. He reveals that among the clients are companies with small fleets and fleets of heavy vehicles up to 6,000, including Fire Department, Military Police, SAMU ambulance fleets and electric utilities companies. "We are talking about the supply and maintenance of vehicles for services that are essential for the population and, therefore, the online and real-time management has to work properly. Our responsibility is even higher if we look at the process from this point of view," he says.

Driven by the commitment to client companies

One of the pillars in Edenred's service is taking care of its more than five million users. This is so true that Geraldo Spinelli and Sergio Belmonte, IT executives, constantly repeat in their speeches that the customer is always right. More than that, as Spinelli tells, his staff - the IT department - and even himself have already moved to service customers 'on site'.

To address customer satisfaction and other equally important issues, Edenred has a committee that meets weekly. During the meetings, Spinelli received feedback from customers about the slow response time and web site, which made no sense since the monitoring systems and infrastructure management informed that everything was fine. "We care for our IT facilities and have management and monitoring tools that monitor the situation. Even with all our care, we received feedback about slow returns, among other things," Belmonte says.

"Based on these discrepancies, we generated a demand for a system that would help us to anticipate and understand what was happening over there, at customer's home. We considered the possibility of developing our own system internally, because we did not find anything on the market that met our expectations. That was when we knew about SiteSeeing," the manager says. "We understood since then that we needed a system that would inform us, with exemption, about the real vision and perception of users about our online services. SiteSeeing gave us this picture."

Business through the eyes of the user

The solution employed by Edenred has the advantage of providing the vision and perception of the end user. "Regardless of who is right, we want to know how our client is feeling in relation to our system. SiteSeeing warns about any response time variation or unavailability in accordance to our service levels. Now we have a tool that produces concrete evidence of what is and what is not happening," the manager says.

The monitoring provided by SiteSeeing is done out of Edenred, directly by the servers of the company that supplies the software. This, the executives agree, is one more guarantee that it is an impartial audit. "The monitoring is independent of Edenred and we are informed when the client is experiencing a problem. Everything in an automatic way. We receive system alerts via email, SMS, and detailed reports. Likewise, when there is no problem, SiteSeeing helps us demonstrate this in our commercial relations and helps find, where exactly is the bottleneck within the client's home," Sergio Belmonte said.

"When we came over SiteSeeing, we united usefulness with a pleasant user experience. It is an intelligent, configurable tool and the monitoring service is provided in an impartial way, which gives a higher credibility rate to the quality of our service. Thanks to the diagnoses we received, we improved our infrastructure and our effectiveness. SiteSeeing is more important regarding the quality and the image of innovation it gives to Ticket Car," the director says. But the IT department found other applications for the tool. "SiteSeeing also helps us to finetune the system. It has great applicability," Belmonte says.

And after the successful implementation of the tool to Ticket Car, the IT team has already decided to use SiteSeeing for monitoring other products such as Ticket Restaurante and Ticket Alimentação. "The path of entry of such requests is also the internet. In this case we are talking about more than 50,000 client companies, especially small and medium businesses that can track their requests via the web. We need to monitor that application too,"Spinelli says. And the director goes further: "The next step will be to take that kind of control and auditing to the Ticket Car website in Latin American countries," he anticipates.

About Ticket

Present in Brazil since 1976, Ticket won the historic leadership of the meal agreement sector with Ticket Restaurante. The company also expanded its scope of activity in these 34 years in the country, with the launch of innovative products like Ticket Alimentação, Ticket Car and Ticket Transporte.

With national coverage, Ticket serves 54,000 client companies and 5.3 million users through a network of 280,000 licensed establishments in the 4,800 Brazilian municipalities.

Ticket is an Edenred company comprising the companies Ticket and Accentiv' Mimética.

About Edenred

World leader in cards and vouchers for prepaid services in Brazil, Edenred comprises Ticket and Accentiv'Mimética brands, offering solutions that provide greater welfare for people and support the best business performance.

The company is present in 40 countries with 6,000 employees, about 500,000 client companies, 33 million users and 1.2 million accredited establishments, it develops two product families:

• Benefits for workers and citizens in the feeding area (Ticket Restaurante and Ticket Alimentação), Transportation (Ticket Transporte) and quality of life (Ticket CESU, Childcare Vouchers, etc.)
• Solutions for business productivity: expense management (Ticket Car), incentive and reward programs (Top Premium, Presente Perfeito, meaning Perfect Gift) and new electronic prepaid products.

The volume of cards and vouchers issued by Edenred totaled 12.4 billion euros in 2009, with more than 50% in emerging countries.

About Resource SiteSeeing

Resource SiteSeeing specializes in monitoring applications, infrastructure and business indicators. Regardless of the technology, it monitors the performance of any business application and identifies the causes of slowness or unavailability, suggesting or doing corrective action. For more information, visit www.siteseeing.com.br.