Read our blog to learn more about how technology can help you to grow your business and the best practices you should implement to keep your organisation running smoothly.
The field service industry is set to grow by 16.9% between 2019 and 2026.
As a result, competition is going to be fiercer than ever, so field service management businesses will need to do everything they can to stay ahead of the curve.
However, typical field service management organisations have several moving parts. From job scheduling and dispatching to invoicing and beyond, managing field service companies can be extremely complex, leaving vital details to fall through the cracks.
Thanks to technological advancements in recent years, job management can be as simple as clicking a button.
In this blog, we’ll share some field service management best practices to help keep your organisation running smoothly. Plus, we’ll cover how technology can help you to effectively grow your business. 🚀
How can technology help you grow your business?
According to research, 94% of workers perform time-consuming and repetitive tasks during their jobs.
Modern customers expect a straightforward, convenient experience that traditional field service management methods make difficult to provide.
Therefore, to survive and thrive in today’s modern world, field service companies must stay up-to-date with the latest technology, so they don’t fall behind the competition.
Field service management software and effective job management allow you to manage your whole business in one platform, eliminating paperwork and lowering margins for error.
🔍In fact, 66% of businesses believe that automation is essential to running their business.
As a result, your team has more time to focus on activities that contribute directly to business growth.
So, let’s look at the top 3 best practices that can help you grow your business.
Top 3 field service management best practices
Here are the top 3 field service management best practices that will help to ensure your business stands out from the competition:
1. Schedule and dispatch technicians efficiently
Data from Verizon Connect suggests that scheduling and dispatching difficulties are one of the key challenges faced by field service organisations.
Without a strong scheduling and dispatching system in place, the following areas can suffer:
- Customer service
- Employee satisfaction
- Operations
- Profitability
Scheduling and dispatching are crucial elements of a field service business, and getting it wrong can have an impact across the whole business.
Many field service businesses still rely on manual methods such as emails and spreadsheets for scheduling purposes which can lead to miscommunication and ineffective scheduling.
Luckily, advances in technology provide field service organisations with the tools they need to boost efficiency, customer experience, and profits.
Effective scheduling provides a number of benefits:
🚛Ensure that technicians are able to work efficiently. Optimised scheduling and dispatching prevent field service technicians from wasting time travelling between jobs, waiting for jobs, getting stuck in traffic or waiting for parts to arrive.
Not only does this ensure that technicians can attend as many appointments per day as possible, but it also reduces fuel costs.
💁Manage customer expectations and save the back-office team’s time by providing customers with automated updates on the progress of their technician.
Having the correct scheduling and dispatching software in place allows you to send automated and real-time updates to customers based on the arrival time of their technician on the day of their appointment and keep them updated on any schedule changes. This can help to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
📱Improve communication between back-office staff and technicians. If back-office staff have a better overview of where technicians are, job progress, and what customers need, they are better equipped to communicate with technicians to ensure they’re in the right place at the right time.
2. Perform predictive and preventative maintenance
Did you know that unplanned maintenance costs an eye-watering three to nine times more than planned preventative maintenance?
In addition, 81% of businesses experience downtime at least once a year as a result of defective equipment and assets.
Taking a reactive approach to vehicle maintenance and repair can be tempting but can result in higher costs for your business. It also presents the following challenges:
❎Higher call-out fees
❎Higher costs for parts and repairs
❎Longer periods of downtime
❎Increased risk of accidents for technicians
❎Risk of non-compliance with regulations
❎Impact on profits
What’s the solution?
To prevent the costs associated with the challenges of reactive maintenance, it’s important to prioritise predictive and preventative maintenance.
Fortunately, with a modern field service management (FSM) system in place, scheduling maintenance needn’t be a logistical nightmare. It can offer the following benefits:
⚒️Streamlines the predictive and preventative maintenance process
⚒️Improves health and safety measures
⚒️Allows technicians to submit vehicle safety checks on a regular basis and submit results easily through a mobile app
⚒️Provides an understanding of vehicle defects, allowing fleet managers to make fixes quickly
⚒️Provides an overview of the problems that commonly occur within the fleet and work to mitigate them without having to spend hours keeping manual records
3. Go mobile
According to 80% of technicians; mobile technology is critical to enhancing their efficiency and effectiveness in helping customers.
But, despite technicians being on the road or attending client sites for the majority of their days, many field service organisations don’t provide mobile technology as a standard.
However, businesses that don’t consider their customer experience run the risk of denting their bottom line. At worst, field service businesses could make themselves obsolete as people look to their competitors for better service.
Going mobile provides a huge number of benefits for your business, technicians, back-office staff, and customers.
Key benefits of going mobile
📱Better communication - if technicians have access to a mobile app, it makes it easier for them and your back-office staff to keep each other updated. This helps to provide a faster reaction time for customers, helping to increase customer satisfaction.
📱Track all customer interactions - with a central system in place, back-office staff and technicians can record all interactions they have with customers and previous job history. Not only does this give staff a quick overview of any job, but it also increases customer satisfaction by preventing them from having to explain the job every time they speak to someone.
📱Reduced paperwork - to ensure that your technicians are as effective as possible, it’s ideal to keep them away from having to fill out paperwork. Having the right technology in place helps automate data entry tasks and admin work that technicians must carry out before, during, and after a job.
📱Improved job performance - having access to a mobile app allows technicians to track the time spent on tasks more accurately and invoice correctly at the end of the job, which improves profitability for your business.
Two key takeaways
Takeaway #1: Keeping ahead of competitors and implementing job management software to help you provide your customers with the best experience, provide your employees with the tools they need to do their jobs effectively, and improve profits for your business.
Takeaway #2: Field service management software is now a key part of any successful and efficient field service business and allows you to track and control every job, from quotation to payment, on a single platform.
And finally, everything you need to know will be at your fingertips, making it easy to plan, manage, schedule, and track your field-based workforce and transport operations.
Find out how BigChange can help your business, book a free demo today.
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