Tag: Field Service Management
It has been proven, way back in 2011, that in field service, almost 89% of your customers are most likely to stop buying from you and go after one of your competitors, if you don’t take service to your customers seriously enough!
That’s right! The risk is pretty high! But not if you know what to do about it.
Now, you might be thinking, “Of course we take service seriously, that’s our business!”, and yes, you might be providing effective services to your customers when they need them. But do you care about your customers enough to help PREVENT their possible issues?
Watch the barriers to growth and adoption of virtual customers.
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Do you take your customer service seriously enough to be proactive?
The answer to that question, should ideally be yes, and you should be at least half way there in the next few years, considering what customers expect from their service providers these days. It is when you are doubtful about it, that you run the risk that I mentioned before.
This problem arises more, usually when companies wait until something happens with a customer’s asset to provide a service fix. This kind of reactive customer support is more of the norm for a lot of companies in field service. This is probably because of a number of reasons like a lack of knowledge, lack of resources etc.
However, as we had discussed earlier on one of our previous blogs, customers these days expect field service companies to be on top of the latest technologies and deliver more than what they actually demand. Read more about it: Changing Customer Perceptions: How To Take Advantage
Whatever caters to their convenience better, is what they are going to use.
Hence, if a field service company is able to anticipate possible problems with their assets well in advance, and provide service without having them request for it, then a customer is not going to look further than that. And that is why proactive customer service is your best friend.
According to a report by Enkata, taking an initiative in your customer service or support could increase your customer retention rates by about 3 to 5%.
Why should you go for proactive customer service?
Apart from the fact that it increases customer retention rates, it also helps to reduce the number of calls or enquiries you get from your customers, as you can take care of their issues before they even arise.
Besides that, you get a chance to create a positive impact in the minds of the customers, before their problem arises. This puts you in a good picture, when they talk about you to others.
In case you are wondering what kind of an image your customers would have of you, if you acted proactively, here are some interesting findings:
- According to InContact, about 87% of the adults surveyed were happy to be contacted by their service providers proactively, regarding their issues.
- 75% of the respondents of the survey, said that they experienced a positive change in the perception of a company that called them proactively and gave them a pleasant surprise or a positive call experience, out of which 62% have taken action as a result.
- About 65% of respondents said they were open to being contacted about fraudulent activity on one of their accounts
- A major share (53%) was open to setting reminders and appointments and another 51% of them were open to being contacted for questions regarding an order placed by them
Benefits of “proactiveness” to your business
Here’s an interesting fact.
Anglian Water, a leading supplier of water and water recycling services, sends more than 200,000 emails and messages to their customers every year, as notifications about outages or other problems in their particular areas. This practice helps them reduce customer calls by a large margin and they have reported to be saving somewhere between £100,000 and £200,000 worth of call center costs every year!
This is a clear example of how effective it can be for your business, to be proactive. As I mentioned before it actually gives you a chance to create a good impression in the minds of customers by meeting and even exceeding their expectations before they actually demand it. It helps to nurture and strengthen customer relationships, by which you can improve your business through better services as well as better advocacy or sheer “word of mouth”.
They say, ‘a satisfied customer tells 3 friends, and an angry customer tells 3000.’ If you start being proactive, address the issues of even your unhappy customers and turn them around to being your brand advocates instead, imagine how contagious it can get!
Protect yourself from escalation
Apart from creating new brand advocates and improving the value of your business, being proactive can also help you protect yourself against escalation. It is always better to identify any kind of negativity surrounding your business, and warn your customers beforehand, so as to avoid a social crisis. According to a research by Altimeter, poor experiences was the major cause of customer complaints online.
To sum it all up, being proactive should be the way forward for you as the competition in the industry is getting tighter and customer expectations are not getting any smaller! It is going to be a matter of survival for you in no time.
Take the necessary steps right away and make the shift from reactive customer service to proactive customer service.
To learn a few basic steps and possible ways for you to begin with, stay tuned for our next blog.
How inappropriate would it be if we were still using the old brick-sized, heavy mobile phones, in this age of the digital revolution, where touchscreens rule?
Pretty cringeworthy isn’t it?
That’s probably how more than half, (according to Software Advice, a company that reviews field service software), that is about 54% of small field service firms feel about using whiteboards, paper and spreadsheet software for their businesses, in this age where custom field service management solutions are the norm. The reasons for this practice are varied, including cost concerns and even sheer inertia.
If you are one of those firms, let me bring to your notice, a simple fact.
According to an Aberdeen group study, the “best-in-class” field service technicians average an 89% on their first-time fix rate and a 92% compliance with stated response times.
How high do your technicians measure up with that?
Let’s face it! Field service is an innately mobile industry, which just cannot be done with static tools, sitting in an office room. And this has been so, for as long as the need for products to be serviced has been there. This is essentially why using spreadsheet software and paper for field service activities is simply not the right thing to do.
Here are some more reasons why you should consider moving away from spreadsheets to transform your field service operations:
Assuring Quality when Leveraging Contractors
Field service companies, are always in a never-ending quest to find the best field service technicians to represent their company. And even after finding the best technicians and assigning work, you need to keep a track of your technicians’ performances to identify the top performers and the poor performers.
Now true, these tasks can be done on a spreadsheet. But it would require a significant amount of time to manually assess, rate and rank all of your technicians. Besides, the assessment you make would be just based on the information gathered manually from your organization. Imagine the time and effort involved in recording performance details in and out of the organization and analyzing them manually?
The truth is, spreadsheets are only as good as the person using it, and humans can make errors.
With an appropriate Field Service Management (FSM) solution, you can search and find the best technicians, as it provides relevant marketplace ratings to choose from. Like for example on eBay, where you get to check seller ratings before you make a purchase.
Moreover, FSM solutions can provide dynamic or real-time, accurate information on the performance of technicians, allowing you to make a better judgment. You can also use the software for screening your technicians and verifying their work experience, certifications, and other credentials before hiring them.
Real-Time Intelligence for Prompt Servicing
Dealing with 1,000 units of field service workforce, on a daily basis is no simple task. For the same reason, using spreadsheets to manage all their work could be quite precarious. One of the major reasons is that the job details of each technician lies static and dispersed in a number of documents, in a number of places. This means there is duplicated data, and even when the documents get updated at one end, it doesn’t reflect in other places until later.
FSM solutions can eliminate such issues, and allow you to aggregate everything under a single platform. This makes searching and locating specific information much easier. Moreover, you can quickly analyze the status of every single project that you have assigned, with just a glance, enabling you to effectively plan and complete tasks on time and under budget. The field service technicians can also enter real-time information straight from the field through their smartphones, which provides you with the much-needed real-time intelligence, to be responsive to customers and serve them better.
Effective Cost Management
Field Service companies as such, face plenty of uncertainties around managing field service operations and hence find it difficult to accurately forecast costs and resources required. For example, specific information like the costs incurred on technicians in California, or the portion of total cost allocated towards a 100 contractors and the like, are often difficult to extract from the truckloads of paper and spreadsheets dealt with.
FSM solutions provide much better insights, filtering options, and in-depth analytics into the breakdown and estimation of service costs, allowing managers to get a better grip over general expenses.
Smart Routing of Services
The task of having to run through entire spreadsheets, just to check the availability of a particular technician, only to discover that the information provided in the spreadsheet has not been updated for several hours is itself tiresome. Finally ending up assigning the job to an unskilled technician, on account of non-availability of the required technician, when he actually was available, is the height of inefficiency.
The fact is that spreadsheet software can only do so much.
FSM software, on the other hand, can allow you to assign and route service to technicians in a smarter way, saving hours of time and effort. It also lets you control your workforce better, reduce customer response times, first-time fix rates and be more proactive.
Apart from these major benefits, Field Service Management Software can provide you with powerful analytics and insights about your business that a spreadsheet cannot. It can help you identify business opportunities and work towards them, by improving on your weak points too.
Moreover, spreadsheets are way too static for field service. It cannot give you the essential dynamic capabilities that an FSM solution can.
It is high time you made the switch to FSM software and grabbed the opportunities to gain the competitive advantage. Talk to our experts to know how Field Service Management software can give you better ROIs.
Field service businesses are trying to capitalize on the advantages offered by today’s technologies. Mobile technology, being the most significant among them, has taken the industry by storm, offering increased productivity gains, streamlines work processes, improved field agent communications, increased first-time fix rate, shortened billing cycles, reduced overhead of paper-based field service management and so on. The infographic puts together some recent trends, impacts and state of mobile technology in Field Service Businesses.
Interested in learning more on enabling your field team with mobile technologies? We’d love to know your business requirements and help accordingly, contact our specialist team now.
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The field service industry is rich with technology these days, equipping field service technicians with all the right tools to improve their productivity and efficiency. Especially with mobility being mainstream, field representatives are able to be much more effective in their field today, than they have ever been before.
So how do mobile field service solutions help to create a huge impact on customers and eventually improve profits?
Only the right requirements
A field service mobile app that has only the necessary features and requirements will be more effective than one which is overloaded with features.
For example, a lot of companies make the mistake of creating a mobile replica of their CRM for their field service app. Now, this is a bad idea, because first of all, it would be quite an extensive project, not to mention the complexity and costs involved.
Secondly, a copy of the entire database of the company’s customers is not really something that a field representative would need for his work.
Here are some of the most effective features that can be included in a field service mobile app:
- Centralized work order scheduling and tracking – Being able to view and keep track of all work orders from a single easy-to-use dashboard is one of the most important features of a field service mobile application. It helps the managers monitor work orders as well as the progress made by the field workers, thereby enabling them to make better and faster decisions.
- Priority wise notifications – Considering the busy schedule of field workers, it is practically difficult to keep checking their mobile apps for any tasks that need to be completed. This may also cause delays in tasks being seen and hence increase in completion time. Hence, it is important to have an automated status update feature, which prompts the field worker for every new work assigned, and allows them to accept it or reject it too so that it can be reassigned to the next worker.
- Geolocation – Geolocation helps to track and identify the location of the field workers, according to which the dispatchers can assign and reassign tasks.
Take a look at our blog 5 Key Features That Maximize Efficiency of a Mobile Field Service Application to know more.
Forms and questionnaires
Field service representatives might need to collect a lot of information while they are at their site, which they might need to enter into their systems, once they are back in office. This can be avoided with the help of a mobile app, as it contains different electronic versions of feedback surveys, questionnaires and the like. The information can be directly entered into the app right in the beginning, and it gets automatically uploaded into the CRM system, which can then be used by field service representatives as well as the marketing department for their analysis.
The right hardware
An enterprise field service mobile application, fit into a 4 or 5 inches mobile screen, may not be the best of ideas. Not only is it quite a task for the UI developers, it also makes job for field technicians more difficult, as they definitely need more space to make the best of the app features. Tablets may be more ideal for tailoring mobile field service software. About 8 to 10 inches of space, may be more convenient for field technicians to scroll through their app and utilize its features, especially filling forms and questionnaires.
Different kinds of information can be best displayed in different kinds of hardware or devices, like tablets for forms, mobiles for updating and retrieving information and the like. Hence, the right hardware can make a huge difference.
Taking care of these points can help you make the most out of your mobile field service software, and increase the efficiency of your field service workforce. It also helps you better manage them.
Talk to our field service management experts to create an effective field service management solution for your business.
The demand for field service management solutions has been on the rise for a very long time now and it has reached an all time high. According to a recent research by Gartner, the revenue from field service and workforce management systems comes to around $1.3 billion annually. The kinds of technology used for field management has been transforming the way field agents worked in their sites. Field service management solutions have gone a long way in increasing workforce productivity as well as improving collaboration among the field service employees. Now let’s see what other kinds of technologies are set to revolutionize the industry.
Internet of Things (IoT)
The Internet of Things is something that has had a huge impact in terms of productivity, as with this, you can practically access or even process and transmit information from pretty much any object. Machine to Machine communication (M2M) has been in use in the field service industry for quite some time now. With IoT, this system of sending and receiving signals from one device to another can expand and go beyond its boundaries to include a whole network of devices. According to a leading M2M solutions provider, “M2M is essentially about connecting and communicating with a thing, where a ‘thing’ may be a machine, a device or a sensor – basically anything that can send data whereas IoT goes beyond connecting computers with things. It represents things connecting with systems including business applications, ERP, and CRM systems, analytics systems, data warehouses and also people (workers, employees, customers)”. It basically means they have a much larger scope. Their potential is so vast, that it can range from enabling emergency service alerts in the case of search and rescue operations or even helping energy companies detect problems early on using alerts and predictive analysis. For example, a crack in a water pipe or a waste pipe can be identified using sensors and can reported to the control center with the help of alerts. Through this, the technician can repair the damage before it causes any severe problems. Similarly, IoT with cloud-based services and remote machines can send location information, status details as well as other such condition based service information., that can influence the world of field services greatly.
Augmented reality and wearables
Augmented reality is one technology that will definitely have a huge impact on the way field service agents work. When leveraged with wearable technology, workers get to actually experience real world situations and issues with the help of computer-generated sensory inputs such as sounds, videos, graphics etc. For example, a field worker can analyze the equipment or areas he is working on by augmented reality enabled glasses and identify the exact cause of the issue and remedy for it too. Hence, it becomes much easier for him to make the repairs in reality. Thus, augmented reality and wearables are actually 2 faces of a single coin, as one is supplemented by the other. They streamline field service management, introduce new and improved ways of working and interacting with people through Smart Watches, mobile phones, Smart Glasses etc.
3D Printing
This is also a technology that has been in the industry for several years now. It greatly helps field service managers and agents generate parts or equipments that they might need in their work in 3D. For example, if a repair requires a particular equipment or tool or part that is not available with you at the moment or is low on stock, you might need to put off your service visit for days or weeks. With 3D printing, you are relieved of such an issue. It provides an efficient system for parts management. It helps you create anything on the spot, with the help of a 3D printer, provided you have the required diagrammatics for it. According to Gartner, over the next three years, 3D printing is likely to reach a turning point, as the demand for low-cost printing devices is increasing rapidly and its use in industries is also significantly high.
Field service organizations are already using most of these technologies in their daily operations. As a part of our ever dynamic business environment, it is also important to look out for newer technologies and be open to technological changes. Since all of these technologies contribute to the productivity and efficiency of organizations, you need to make use of them in the best possible way. Technological disruption is bound to happen, so might as well make the most of it.
Gone are the days when getting electrification or plumbing issues fixed in a building meant endless number of phone calls and long hours of waiting. And mostly at the end of this the issue may or may not be fixed. A myriad of issues from lack of accountability, coordination and centralized system for tracking and follow ups cause frustration and loss of reputation.
There used to be a number of issues like these with regular paper-based field service management systems, all of which contributed to the general inefficiency of the market as a whole. But organizations these days have become much more sophisticated as many of them have already realized the need to move to Field Service Management (FSM) software.
Today, Field Service Management solutions are being adopted by various industries for their field service operations. They play a very important role in enhancing organizational productivity and efficiency. According to a recent report by MarketsandMarkets the global FSM market is forecasted to grow from $1.58 billion in 2014 to $3.52 billion by 2019 and the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) is expected to be 17.3%. And the biggest market in terms of market size is expected to be North America.
That said, here are some reasons which have led to the expansive adoption of Field Service Management solutions by organizations and, of course, the growth of the market:
Real-time based solution – The technicians or the field service agents, as well as the providers, have real-time access to all the required information. The providers are always aware of where their agents are, what work they are doing, when they finish their work etc. So, the agents are always in contact with the providers unlike the old system of field service management.
Quick, systematic scheduling and dispatching – A service can be assigned to a field agent based on availability, location or manually by the manager. The field agent can be alerted to new work orders through SMS, E-mail or push notifications on his smartphone. Thus, service to the customers is made faster and more efficient.
Limitations of ERP and CRM solutions – There was once a time when ERP and CRM solutions had the upper hand in the field services industry. They could enhance efficiency by automating the processes and optimizing resources. But they failed to meet certain specific demands of field service management like scheduling, dispatching performance management etc. These demands led to the increased adoption of Field Service Management solutions and thereby increased productivity. And, of course, most advanced field service management software easily integrate with ERP and CRM solutions.
Reduction in operational cost – The overall cost of operations are reduced when compared to paper-based field service management. All the costs relating to maintenance and storage of paperwork and contacting service agents etc can be eliminated. Moreover, the costs involved in the process of a particular field service can be tracked easily because of the transparency of the solution. This helps to keep a check on costs and avoid redundancy or duplication. Also, its history can be tracked to save on inventory costs and even fuelling costs, by finding the most efficient way to reach the area of service.
Integration with mobile devices – It is important for the field agents to have access to information relating to their job or client while they are at their work. They may also need to record job details. Field Service Management solutions have the advantage of being mobile integrated and so all these activities can be done easily. Hence, mobile integration is one of the biggest factors that has contributed to the increase in adoption rate of FSM solutions.
These factors put together with the ease of use, really makes Field Service Management Solutions popular. Although, companies still use ERP and CRM solutions for managing field services due to lack of awareness.
FSM solutions help workers to collaborate and work effectively. They enable real-time collaboration among the field agents as well as the providers and thereby increase productivity and organizational efficiency. They also have features like automatic notifications, advanced GPS tracking, reporting etc. which further help in making work more organized and efficient.