It’s best to know what we are talking about when we say maximize, optimize and automate. That’s because those three things can mean so many different things to different people. And each of them can have different solutions when using some form of dispatching software. Regardless of what industry you are in, however, finding these potentials is an easy way to grow your business. That means:
- Generating more revenue
- Adding more customers
- Signing more contracts
- Taking on more service calls
How dispatch software will maximize, optimize and automate the growth of your business:
Dispatching Software Reaches More Customers
When talking about maximizing your potential, it’s about adding more customers and service calls into your day. Whether you use a field service dispatch software or not, your technicians have a certain number of calls they can handle in a day.
Things that can factor into the number of calls technicians take
- How complex is each service call
- How far they have to drive between each call
- Road conditions
- Types of service calls they are taking
To add more service calls to a technician’s schedule, you need a better idea of what their schedule looks like, to begin with. If you are blindly assigning work orders, allowing technicians to schedule themselves, or using whiteboards still, you are missing the bigger picture. With dispatching software, the entire schedule of each technician is available. With a skill set search, you can narrow down your available technicians by skills and certification. Afterwards, you can see their entire schedule. To maximize the number of customers reached in a day, move their schedule around to fit in the most service calls. Idle time is revenue leakage. So, maximize the number of customers you can reach by building a schedule through greater insight.
Optimizing With Dispatching Software
You can’t optimize without first getting insight into the movements of your technicians in the field. That comes in a few different forms. Firstly, by using Business Intelligence to assess each technician’s travel, idle and repair times. It’s a quick way to see who is driving a lot more than they need to be and finding out the reason why. Secondly, with the field service mobile app, dispatchers can track technicians in real-time. With GPS location enabled, they can see where the technicians are and where they are headed to.
Finally, where field service businesses can really grow is by optimizing the routes their technicians take. Routes that haven’t been optimized can have technicians losing valuable time for invaluable reasons. Situations, where your technician starts on one side of the city, drive across the city for one call and back across for another, is time being wasted. Instead, with dispatching software, dispatchers can see each route and appointment technicians are taking and plan a route that is best for business. Stop the needless driving and build routes with the lowest miles driven and lowest drive times. Not only does this add more work-time to your technician’s schedule, but it also reduces gas and vehicle repair expenses.
Automate the Processes
Scheduling and dispatch are a prime candidate for automation. In order to grow your business in today’s field service industry, manual processes just can’t be part of the process anymore. Technicians don’t have time to waste filling out paper-based work orders. Dispatchers don’t have time to waste calling technicians with changes to those work orders. Or, rerouting them to other calls and changing their schedules. So, levels of automation need to be in place in order to successfully grow the business. Field service dispatch software comes with those automation tools needed.
With preventative maintenances plans automating the work order process and eliminating whiteboards for scheduling, dispatchers can push work orders to the field quickly. With the field service mobile app, technicians receive those work orders and use the mobile app to complete the call. Should a change in the schedule happen, dispatchers can make the changes and push the new schedule to the technician. On their mobile device, technicians continue to the next call, perhaps not even noticing their schedule has changed.
Furth more, with the field service mobile app, technicians’ complete tasks and checklists, collect parts, expenses, time and customer signatures and close out calls. They aren’t wasting time writing down information on work orders. And then making sure those work orders get back to the office. It’s all done automatically through the mobile app. No more driving back to the office to pick up or drop off work orders. Which is more work-time they can be scheduled for.
Kickstart Growth With Dispatching Software
Growth in your field service business will come when you start to take a look at your most critical practice and make changes. Dispatching has so much potential to help grow a business that dispatching software is becoming a must-have in the field service industry. With field service dispatch software, not only are you getting better dispatching and scheduling tools, but also a work order management system that will have you automating many of your processes. Have effective change happen across your business