Being a small business in field services is an operational challenge with too many touchpoints. From dispatching field service technicians, and material logistics to customer experience – a field service business faces many operational workflows to manage.
Using the software, digital tools, and automation, helps maintain quality consistency in delivering field services. Learn how your small field service business can streamline its mobile workforce and improve customer experience.
Challenges in managing the mobile workforce for small field service business
Here are the top 5 challenges that restrict a small field service business’s growth:
- Coordination: syncing client requirements with available field service technicians gets tough when scaling the business.
- Communication: without real-time updating, your team has to perform constant back-and-forth
- Customer service: one is dependent on the skills and professionalism of field service technicians who often work on a contractual basis.
- Monitoring: analyzing your workforce’s performance is difficult when it’s mobile
- Managing resources: knowing when to refill inventory and managing logistics as per demand.
How does field service management software enable mobile workforce management?
Field service management software helps a business manage a mobile workforce, logistics, and operations. Its main contribution lies in bringing jobs and workflows together to provide good operational visibility.
Here’s how it helps specifically with mobile workforce management:
Automated field service scheduling
Using field service management software, you can automatically assign work to field service technicians based on their availability, skills, and location. You can automate their schedules and manage to dispatch work to clients. It also helps aggregate job information via relevant forms and send it to assigned field service workers.
Track new and ongoing jobs
When you’re a small business, losing sight of the work done and managing business development is common. The software will help you track your workforce’s job status and manage attendance.
Zuper, a field service management app, includes features like geofencing that notifies the back-office team when a worker leaves the job site. In this way, you can understand the on-ground productivity and take measures to improve it.
Real-time updates
Real-time communication for the mobile workforce is vital to ensuring smooth job completion. You do not have to do constant back-and-forth for sharing information. Customers can know in real time about their job status or field service technician location. You can make quick decisions and stay alert about ongoing business operations.
Efficient customer management
For field services, inefficient management of your mobile workforce can lead to disgruntled customers. For example, if your customer wants to reschedule their visit, making them experience too many communication loops creates a wrong impression.
Field service management software helps manage new leads, track their customer journey, and strategize for conversion. For the converted orders, the software makes it easy to manage delivery. You can also seamlessly work on support tickets. The software will also help you become customer-centric by automatically collecting feedback from customers for the work done.
Manage payments and invoices
A field service business has to pay across multiple touchpoints like logistics, transportation, material vendors, customers, and field service technicians. Managing so many transactions manually may lead to errors in making payments for a small business. Field service management helps you manage and track payments from onboarding the client to the final delivery of work.
It also helps send automated reminders to your customers for completing the payments. It can manage customer information and analyze for ways to improve operational efficiency.
Generate reports to make business decisions
A field service management app helps you create periodical reports about various business aspects. Gain insights on your payment cycles, the performance of field service workers, or vendor logistics. Reporting also acts as proof of work for paying your mobile workforce. It also helps you understand which jobs are getting delayed in completion and why.
Make the most of your mobile workforce
Efficiently managing your mobile workforce means saving operational costs and scaling business. This also means better retention of field service technicians. A small step of enabling field service management software helps increase worker and customer satisfaction.
At Zuper, our field service management software grows as your small business scales. We equip you with complete field service operation solutions across payments, customer management, scheduling, and dispatching work. To know more about how Zuper fits your field service business needs – book a demo today.