Data, data, and more data: data fuels insights, and insights empower business owners to make better-informed, more strategic decisions to improve internal operations and the resulting customer experiences.
Here are five ways in which business insights can be leveraged to improve field service operations:
- Smart scheduling and dispatch management: Dispatch the right technicians with the correct tools to complete jobs on the first trip. For added efficiency, plan routes to minimize travel time for each technician. This enables them to provide the most services possible per route and lessens the fuel, time, energy, and frustration of having to go back and forth.
- Tight internal collaboration: Effective and efficient field services require internal collaboration that goes far beyond an individual team. Entire departments, from sales reps to technicians, must be aligned on company processes, standards of service, and customer requirements to deliver efficient service that meets and exceeds customer expectations.
- Proactive planning and predictive maintenance: Emergency services and the accompanying stress on everyone involved – particularly with service scheduling and technician dispatching – should be a rarity, not a common occurrence. With the use of advanced technology enabling regular preventative or predictive maintenance, you can plan ahead to the greatest extent possible to the benefit of all stakeholders.
- Work order management: By tracking work orders from inception to service delivery and invoicing in a smooth, seamless process, your field service operations run like a well-oiled machine.
- Customer-adaptive processes: Finally, remember who you are serving. The customers of today are a new breed: they have heightened expectations, communication preferences, and alternatives at their disposal should your service fall short. A fully integrated field service management solution provides the agility to adapt processes to the customer’s preferences. It helps you anticipate the customers’ requirements and ensures that they consistently receive timely updates and accurate estimates.