There is room for the little guy, even amongst the giants in the field service industry. The market across every industry is growing, and the competition is getting fierce—so much so that even the smallest of businesses are having to take their service delivery up to the levels the enterprises and corporations are, except on a tighter budget and smaller scale.
But small doesn’t mean ineffective, and if you talk to any small-to-medium-size business owner, they will tell you their technicians are just as good as the rest. In fact, they could be even better in some cases, more responsive, and offer a greater customer experience than the larger organizations will. Generally, small-to-medium businesses are locally owned, know their customers personally, and have established a great relationship with their clients. However, to stay in front of the trends and continue to evolve, these businesses need to be looking at technological solutions to their problems, and that means investing in good mobile field service management software.
By 2020, 80 percent of US small businesses will be using cloud computing, as it’s vital to every business practice to be connected. That’s where cloud-based field service software can help, while also offering built-in analytic tools, mobile app solutions, integrations, and innovations that can assist with inventory, efficiency, and productivity. Here are ways small-medium businesses are using digital field service software solutions to compete.
1. Focusing on what they do best
Small businesses generally work in a niche of their own. They have carved out their own market and deliver excellent service to the customers in that market. The problem becomes that to grow revenue in the smallest of businesses, you need to take on more customers to increase the bottom line. That could mean going off into areas you’re not experienced in, or for which you don’t have the manpower.
Instead, small businesses are doubling down on what they do best to increase their service revenue. And they are using field service software to manage that. In a time when the focus is on technician efficiency and productivity, small businesses are doing everything they can to help make their technician’s jobs easier, lessen their administrative workload, and get them to job sites faster. This, in turn, sets them up to complete calls faster and get in more calls per day. Field service management software assists in the scheduling of technicians to maximize their time so that the maintenance, repairs, and inspection they do best are the core focus on the business each day.
By focusing on what they do best, first time fix rates will be higher, call times will be shortened, there will be less time spent on training while on the job site, and standards will remain high. With customer expectations growing, offering outstanding service is becoming the focus of the job, and for smaller businesses, it’s better to be great at one thing, then good at several things.
2. Be faster and more flexible in responses
One major advantage small businesses have over large enterprises is their ability to be faster in response times and more flexible in their offerings. There is something that can be said about being a business that can be on the job in minutes without much discussion and planning. Emergency calls come in and, in these desperate situations, customers don’t want to be waiting for internal teams to be making decisions on who to send when they just want someone there to look at the problem.
With field service scheduling software, small-medium businesses can offer the flexibility of being able to rearrange schedules of technicians quickly to cover an emergency repair job. Small-and-medium-sized businesses are not going to turn down an opportunity and can generally be a phone call away from having someone at a customer in no time.
The field service mobile app allows technicians to be flexible in the field, as work orders can change throughout the day and allow for changes to happen while they are working on another job. For small-medium businesses, communication is very important, and with limited resources and limited scale of jobs, it needs to be easy to make changes on the fly to maximize any opportunities that may come in.
3. A growing need to access service history
Information is key, and that goes for every small-or-medium-sized business as well. Large enterprises aren’t the only ones who need access to service history at a moment’s notice, especially if technicians are expected to maximize their service time and complete repairs faster. With cloud-based field service software, field service operations are now becoming easier for even the mom and pop shops who need every advantage they can get when booking equipment maintenance or service.
The old, manual ways of completing work orders and filing them just don’t cut it in today’s, need-to-know-now environment, and technicians need the tools to access that information on the job site. It’s why mobile field service software is perfectly designed for small-medium businesses who want to give their technicians all the information they can to complete service faster. At the small level of service delivery, it’s more imperative to make technicians more efficient because they have a smaller technician pool to book the increasing service calls coming in.
4. Keep your employees engaged with Field Service Management Software
As the field service world changes, so are small and medium businesses. More is being expected of technicians in the field, who have to wear many different hats, including being a technician, a customer service representative, and a salesperson. Giving technicians the tools to do all that is only going to keep them more engaged in the business and bring small and medium businesses greater success.
That’s why, with cloud-based field service software, tools with functionality like quoting are available in order to turn your technicians into salespeople and offer additional service on the spot instead of waiting for a salesperson to call back with a quote. Through mobile apps, manuals and instruction guides can be sent to help technicians through difficult repairs, allowing small and medium businesses to take chances on new markets and repairs they haven’t previously done as they look to branch out into new streams for revenue growth.