We are about halfway through the year 2020, and each organization is moving towards their individual goals. There are distinct goals that the industry as a whole finds valuable, and businesses adopt these goals depending upon their growth structure and capabilities. Field service organizations have been working towards upgrading their technology infrastructures to leverage resources to provide more value-added services and equip technicians with the right tools for a connected data-driven future.
Here are the goals field service businesses are looking to reach out to this year:
Fixing Problems Right the First Time
As a result of shifting consumer preferences, more customers are now looking to optimize the value of technician visits. While fixing problems right the first time has always been the goal for field service businesses, it is even more pertinent in today’s climate. Achieving your goals begins with empowering your technicians. If you, as the strategist, want your technician to fix the problems right the first time, your technicians need to be equipped with the right tools and technology.
If the technician has on-site mobile access to the customer history and past service records, he/she is better equipped to fix the machinery breakdown in the first go. Mobile checklists ensure a service protocol is followed and reduces the need for a second visit. Once technicians have access to the work order data, they can be better prepared to answer customer queries, add any additional tasks requested by the customer, complete the work order on-site and go ahead with generating an invoice.
Work Toward Building a Predictive Service Model
Currently, most service-based businesses are working on a reactive or break-fix service model. For example, in a typical industrial equipment scenario, a technician is called only after the machinery has broken down and impacted the productivity of the business.
By integrating your field service management software with the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, you create a proactive service system. You can receive regular updates from the equipment/machinery you are monitoring. Any issue with the equipment will alert your system and help you achieve higher uptime. Achieving this goal will not only give you a competitive advantage, but also a higher customer satisfaction rate as now timely fixes can save customers from more significant machinery breakdowns.
In-Depth Analysis and Data-Driven Decision Making
Data and numbers have always been a part of the field service industry. What is evolving is how the data is used. Earlier, it could be for more straightforward analysis like the number of calls you are taking each month, now you can use the data for a more in-depth analysis, like comparing the fix-time rates of your technicians for a particular job. Applying business intelligence to the data can open endless opportunities for your business, from identifying revenue leakages, evaluating the travel times of your technicians, or using data to improve maintenance scheduling of equipment. An integrated field service management software lays out how all the different factors of your business play with each other.
Achieving More Without Adding Additional Resources
One of the biggest goals of a field service business is achieving true automation using your current ERP systems. The objective of integrating your service departments using the software they use is to automate the flow of information from one system to another without adding any additional software or resources. For example, As soon as a technician completes a work order, he or she can collect the customers’ signature on the spot and immediately close the order and generate an invoice. This invoice is automatically populated with the information from the work order. To accomplish this task without automation, you would have to hire someone in the accounting department that would take all the input from the technician to create an invoice and share it with the customer. End-to-end automation helps you save costs and enables you to achieve efficiency in your tasks by reducing any data entry or duplication errors.
By infusing technology into service operations, field businesses can achieve increased productivity at a lower cost, improve fix-time rates, and focus on adding more service-led revenue streams.