The most common myth while managing field services operations entails the assumption that “it is all about delivery”. If you believe so, you might face many hiccups during your business journey. For the delivery needs to be at the right place, right time and with the right technology. On top of that organisations need to ensure all aspects of field service management from mechanical and administrative aspects to building effective strategies to meet customer expectations, balance the workforce, and stay profitable.
Field service management involves many levels of coordination. Organizations need to do better than before to stay ahead. And this is the stage where difficulties start arising. According to a research report, 73% of field service organizations are still struggling for positive revenue.
Don’t worry! Let us accompany you on the journey to finding out the most pressing issues and the solutions to counter them.
1. Constant delay in achieving targets- Inefficient work schedule
How will the customers be happy when there are endless expectations from the field workers? And there are instances when the field technicians get caught up in one job such that their entire work schedule gets delayed. These glitches occur often. But if you are still using manual methods to plan work schedules of field workers, you are unlikely to notice these kinds of patterns. It becomes necessary for the field workers to have assigned schedules even when they are out of any immediate supervision.
Solution
What if you are given an option to automatically designate the work to all your field service workers in one go? The feature of auto-task management scheduling prevents issues such as incomplete jobs, overtime costs, and customer dissatisfaction. It lets you schedule their jobs, track hours and monitor incoming customer requests easily. You may allocate work orders faster and manage task distribution with agility.
2. No updates- Capturing inaccurate information from the field
You have a field team for marketing, delivery, repair, verification, inspection or others. But you are never up to date about who is going where, when do they meet the customers, clients or merchants and how much time is spent with them. When you do not know the whereabouts of your service team it leads to gaps in:
- Time spent by team members at a location
- Route taken by team members to reach a customer
- Travel time to reach a certain location
Solution
Technology has reached such a stage where you can have instant updates about the location and activities of your employees. For instance, where are they, number of clients visited or how long do they take to finish the tasks? Tracking your workforce is an easy and ethical way to maintain their accountability. It provides you with the following benefits:
- Location updates
- Privacy control with shift timings
- Location to address conversion
- Battery life updates
- Route taken by the team
- Distance travelled by the field team
- Best-in-class mobile presence reporting
- Live notification system
3. Confusion and muddle- Poor communication and collaboration
It is necessary to foster communication between employees and managers. And it is equally essential to keep customers in the loop. For instance, if your field agent is running late or you have to cancel due to some issues, how will you provide customers with complete visibility along with inter-team coordination?
Solution
Retaining and gaining new customers requires attending each of them with equal consideration. Having minute to minute updates fosters your capability to respond faster to customer requests. The customers are also empowered with the option to track the field agents to know the estimated time of arrival on the day of the schedule. Customers can reschedule through emails, text messages, or chat messages anytime and anywhere.
This technology-driven collaboration can also help front line workers to execute tasks, communicate and collaborate with greater effectiveness and efficiency, saving them time and providing them with the friction-less and satisfying employee experience.
4. Operational anomalies- Not leveraging technology
You continue chasing invoices and contracts one minute, then tracking service histories the next. Moreover, your technicians and field agents leave you with piles of paperwork to sort through at the end of each day.
With so many operational processes to track and keep you might face these drawbacks:
- Reduced customer satisfaction
- Increased time in the billing process and time spent collecting payments
- More equipment failures due to low maintenance tracking.
Solution
Automate your field service operations and go paperless! Schedule everything online, make digitised task sheets and much more. With a few clicks, access your customer service histories anytime and anywhere. And the best part is, all of it is available on a single screen. And it just doesn’t end here! You also get instant real-time updates through emails, SMS, push notifications for each order recorded, when any report is sent or any job is done.
5. Piles of paperwork- Performing the data exercise
Transferring information manually from paperwork gathered in the field leads to duplicate entries and errors. Moreover, with erroneous data, its analysis runs futile. Thus, it leads to faulty decisions for marketing, sales, communications and your growth takes a wrong turn.
Solution
Enable your workforce to capture data in the field that can be synced directly into your back-end systems. Also, the digital form enables your team to set a fixed set of questions which can be answered without any typing and instead of ticking away on checklists. The data captured in the field with live analytics can provide insight into the highest opportunity locations. It helps to:
- Record accurate and timely job information such as time spent, parts needed, and expenses
- Record proof such as customer signatures and pictures which are always live (with restricted access to device memory)
- Eliminate piles of paperwork, prevent loss of documents, duplicate entries, and human error
How FeetPort Comes To The Rescue?
You have a servicing business where you provide installation, repair, maintenance and/or commissioning of products and commodities to your customers or on behalf of your clients. You have many people in the servicing team and it gets difficult to manage customer bookings from the website/phone, solve customer complaints on time, allocate work with the live location, get the job sheet accurately filled. Coordinating over WhatsApp or other messaging apps is not effective to ensure customer satisfaction. FeetPort provides the following benefits under field service management:
- Online Scheduling using Machine Learning
- Technician App on Smartphone
- Digital Job Sheet
- Geotagging of Customer Location
- Geofencing of Technician
- Web App for Administrators
- Send SMS/Email/WhatsApp alerts to Customers
- Customer Service History
- GPS Mobile Tracking for Technicians
- User Security with Device Handshake
- Attendance with Face Recognition
Get a free trial today to make FeetPort a unique advantage for your servicing business. FeetPort offers advanced solutions for Field Service Management with extensive features like mobile forms, attendance, checklist, location tracking and data collection. It only takes 5 minutes to get started. What are you waiting for?
