Category: Custom software

“Quality in a product or service is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it”. – Peter Drucker

I couldn’t think of a better explanation for the importance of service excellence than this, by the renowned business management consultant, Peter Drucker. As rightly put, service excellence is achieved when the customer or the client is most happy or satisfied with your product or service. But then again, how exactly do you achieve it?

Service excellence is an on-going journey. The better you get at what you do or deliver, the higher you will push your bar to get even better at what you do. You keep building on service excellence. I’m talking about building on your customer service excellence here. So how can you go about building on service excellence?

Here are 5 tips:

1. Communication – This is a bit of a cliche when it comes to quality of service. As already mentioned, customers need to be most happy. And one of the major factors to ensure that, is communicating with them. By communication, I don’t just mean after sales service. You need to keep a certain level of constant communication with your customers. In other words, engage with them. It builds trust and thereby loyalty. You can have various ways to engage with your customers like special events, contests and feedback. Feedback is one activity, which not only helps in customer engagement but also helps you in knowing what your customers think of you and work on the areas where you need to improve. The more you communicate with your customers, the clearer your goals become.
2. Closeness – Another aspect of communication is closeness. Yes, the better you know your customers, the better you can serve them. You need to be knowing their needs, interests and expectations more than anyone for that matter. Ideally, you need to exceed customer expectations if you want delighted customers. And to exceed their expectations you need to know them today. If you get close enough, you can even predict their behaviour to some extent and you will be able to serve them proactively. Now, that is a whole new level of service excellence.
3. Transparency – At no cost should you compromise on transparency. Be it in terms of pricing or product or service related information or anything that is relevant to your customers. Basically, you should refrain from doing anything that might cause distrust among customers. If your customers are dissatisfied, it will reflect on your possible prospective customers as well. So, there’s more at stake than meets the eye. Transparency adds to the trust factor and the benefits of that, as you know, are manifold.
4. Value addition – This is an extension of the principle of exceeding expectations or proactive customer service. The idea is to give your customers more than what they asked for, in terms of value. You need to add some value while providing services and for that you need to go that extra mile, pay attention to all the details, give in more than a 100% and ensure complete efficiency. You need to make your customers feel important and valued by serving them better. Following this mission of value addition in all your projects, will take you one step closer to excellence.
5. Standards – You need to have customer driven standards, which are realistic, measurable, attainable and time bound. By customer driven standards, I mean, ones which are determined after careful analysis of the feedback from the customers, as well as of customer behaviour through constant engagement with them. The standards so set should be implemented and measured as well, after which you can take steps to improve on them. Based on your evaluation of standards, you will find areas on which you can improve and hence set new standards.

All these are factors which basically add to the satisfaction of customers which, in turn reflects quality in the service you deliver. On the whole, it is pretty clear that it is the customers that help you achieve the goal of service excellence and the more you engage with them, the more they are satisfied, and the more you achieve.

Field service management software is becoming increasingly popular these days. With it’s advanced features of scheduling and dispatching and of course integration with mobile devices, there is no reason why managers like you would prefer anything else.

Now, mobile integration is one of the main advantages of field service management software. Without it, the whole purpose of the software to make field service management easier and faster for everyone, will not be properly served. Even a system with features like scheduling and reporting, will not prove to be very useful in terms of increased efficiency, if it’s not mobile integrated.

So, what exactly is the need for mobile integration in field service management software?

In the earlier developed, on-premise field service management systems, there was centralization of information and reporting but it required the field agents to re-enter the information they collected from the field through paper documents. Moreover, apart from a mobile phone to call, there was practically no way the managers could reach the agents and vice versa.

All these problems can be solved with mobile integration of field service management software. Here are some other advantages of mobile integration:

Back-end Service Knowledge Access

Technicians or field agents while at their work can look up manuals or diagrams available in the backend through the mobile integrated field service management solution and determine the best procedures for repair or even determine the parts or tools required for the repair. Even though your field agents may be experts, they could use tools and techniques that would help them complete their job in a better way. They could also make use of the history of repairs or warranty information etc. of a particular customer’s asset available with the solution to better help in their work. Moreover, they can access customer accounts for billing functions etc.

Transparency and Communication

Gone are the days when you did not know where your field agents are or what they are working on. With the help of mobile integrated field service management systems, you will be able to get real-time job updates and even location information. They also enable real-time communication between the field agents and the managers so you are always ready with information for your customers, as and when they call.

Efficient Data Collection and Accounting

As mentioned before, field service management systems that were not mobile integrated required the field agents to enter work related information twice. Such redundancy of data led to wastage of time and effort thus decreasing productivity. Mobile integration enables the field agents to enter data directly onto the system thereby saving time. Moreover, some solutions offer advanced features like payment processing which allow your agents to collect payments too. All of these digital records further enable smoother accounting and auditing.

Real-Time Scheduling

Routing and scheduling features are the main highlights of any field service management system. But when you have them integrated with a mobile device, you can allow your agents to view their schedules while they are at their work so that they can plan their work accordingly. Based on the location information of an agent, the routing feature helps to plan an optimized route between all the sites that are pending for a particular agent. That way,work becomes systematic and productivity is increased as more work orders can be attended to per day.

All these features make mobile integration for field service management solutions inevitable if you want to increase productivity. Your field agents are the representatives of your company and they reflect the quality of your service. Hence, if they perform better, your customers will be more satisfied. In order to stand ahead in satisfying your customers, you need to have field service management software with all the mentioned features and mobile integration.

Contact us to develop a field service management solution just for your Business.