Rising fuel prices, tighter budgets and higher customer expectations have made the last few years challenging for field services agencies.
As companies strive to balance customer demands with cost goals, they’re turning to field services management software to achieve excellence with fewer resources.
An article on Service Management Online’s website reports that “field service management systems have come to the [front] as enablers to help streamline business processes to improve workforce productivity and customer satisfaction, without the need to increase the size of a field-based workforce.”
The number one way that field services companies justify the implementation of technology is the ability to grow their service organization without the need to add administrative resources. The bottom line is this: justifying the expense of technology is about determining its ROI.
Companies invest in technology when they’re growing, not when they’re cutting costs or when the economy is bad. It’s only when things are turning around that they want to grow the business by adding people and resources without increasing administrative costs.
An Aberdeen Group survey shows that investing in field service software can provide far-reaching benefits, including improvement in fleet utilization, reduced fuel consumption and daily mileage, increased service revenue, and an improvement in workforce productivity.
Modern web based service management software enables “every aspect of a mobile operation to be identified, measured and analyzed,” the Service Management Online article explains. That means field services agencies can boost efficiency by completing more tasks with the same workforce.
Customer satisfaction also gets a boost because the technology allows agencies to answer more service calls and mitigate return visits by ensuring that the right worker does the right job.
In addition, information from the software usually includes vehicle location and work order information, helping businesses to reduce fuel expenses by optimizing route planning and improving operational efficiencies.
With that knowledge, field services agencies can make the real-time decisions necessary to keep their operations running smoothly and efficiently.
Source: Service Management Online, November 2012
