Gain An Edge By Tackling These 7 Field Service Management Industry Challenges
By Akhil Rajan, Zuper
The field service management industry has tremendous scope and endless applications. If you must get a leaking pipe fixed or if you must get an HVAC system installed in your premise, field service management provides processes that can make things super easy for the company, its employees, and its customers.
With the growth of online shopping, food ordering, etc., the need for field service management has grown exponentially. And it has transformed the way businesses work. But, with big changes come big challenges. The customer base is growing at a massive pace, and to keep up with the requirements, you need a strong system with smooth workflows.
Here are the top seven field service management challenges and how you can tackle them to improve your processes.
Scheduling Conflicts
Conflicts happen when your field service representative is assigned to tasks at the same time and date. Three common types of field scheduling conflicts occur, which are as follows:
- Overlapping events: This happens when your field representative has two events scheduled for the same slot on the calendar.
- Double-booking: This happens when two representatives are booked for the same time slot.
- Unavailable time slot: This happens when the representative is booked on a slot when he already busy in another event.
Field scheduling software plans your daily weekly and monthly schedule well in advance. Thus, it empowers your team to cross the operational roadblocks like overlapping events, double-booking, and unavailable time slots.
Perfecting Delivery
How quickly you assign a task affects how fast the task gets delivered. If you are in the online food delivery space, you can have the edge over your competitors based on your delivery time. If you have field service management software in place, it will help you quicken the process, take more orders, and increase your profitability.
Travel Cost
When your field service representative has a predefined route of various jobs, it helps save up on travel costs. It also enables you to measure the representative’s efficiency in any task. And with the help of geolocation, you can plan the easiest, fastest, and least time-consuming route for them.
Work Order Management
Work order management involves several different steps. Suppose there is mismanagement or inefficiency in any of the steps. It can affect the entire workflow altogether and the promised delivery times too. A real-time visibility software helps tracks the movements at every step of the work order. It also helps identify gaps and delays in the processes and helps take the necessary measures to manage them.
Tracking Jobs
Live tracking of jobs is a feature that is ever-increasingly in demand. Be it cabs-on-hire or be it the online food ordering industry, this has become a must-have feature. Field Management Software helps seamless tracking of the field service representative, and hence, is very useful in enhancing customer satisfaction.
Bettering Customer Service
Timely updates and live notifications are features that add brownie points to your customer service. Field service management software will help you do away with the traditional method of calling your field representatives time and again and use advanced technology instead.
Resolving Customer Issues
Turning dissatisfied customers into extremely satisfied patrons is a signature of excellent customer service. Field management software systems help set up bots that are cost-efficient and have a lean and seasoned professional team who can quickly resolve customer complaints effectively.
Conclusion
When you have a big team and a growing customer base, you need technology to effectively reduce time and efficiency in managing the team and executing customer work orders. A field service management software can help you gain a competitive advantage when used effectively.
About The Author
Akhil Rajan is a Customer Success Specialist at Zuper, an intelligent workforce management platform for service-oriented businesses. Working with customers daily, he has a deep understanding of their needs and pain points and so he can contribute to the marketing strategies for Zuper with the content he writes. He writes on topics like how to increase workforce utilization, how to reduce the service turnaround time and increase workforce efficiency, customer adoption, cost reduction strategies, etc - to name a few. He is often found buried in books or playing chess in his free time.