If it happens outside of company property, out in the field, it’s a matter for Field Service Management. This might mean keeping track of your vehicles and the people who drive them, and ensuring your drivers are safe. It can cover workforce management and work order management, goods deliveries, inventory management, scheduling and customer information.
Before the advent of field service management software, all of this was prone to miscommunication, delays, incomplete information, incorrect information and more. These days, thankfully, things are very different. Integrating the management of all these critical activities with your inventory, invoicing, accounting and so on is much smoother and more effective. At the same time, as you can imagine, it’s still rich in challenges. Here we look at 6 common challenges faced by field service managers and explore how RedZebra Software overcomes them.
Challenges Faced by Field Service Managers
A Field Support Manager has an incredibly wide variety of responsibilities around people, systems, processes, procedures and physical goods. It’s challenging, as a busy field service manager, to keep up with all of your roles and field service manager responsibilities. No wonder today’s Field Engineer Manager relies on intelligent software to keep everything under control. Add the trend for mobile workforces, which is likely to grow thanks to the trend set that began during the covid-19 pandemic, and the need for intelligent control is even clearer.
1. Workforce Management
When your workforce is operating away from the premises, managing them becomes a whole lot more tricky than it does when they’re safely at their desks. You want to know exactly where your engineers are at all times, so you can be as efficient and effective as possible, minimise the miles they have to travel, get them where they need to be quickly. Engineer tracking software does an excellent job, allowing you to respond to customer calls fast, send the engineer who’s nearest, provide a quick and efficient service. Our field management software means you can easily track field workers via a map while they’re in the field, which in turn means you ultimately cut back on operating costs as well as improve efficiency.
2. Work Order Management
Task allocation is absolutely vital when you want to carry out work to the highest standards, get it done in good time, and seal your reputation as a business to be reckoned with. This can be a tough call when you’re extremely busy and your field engineers are working to constantly-changing schedules. It’s good to know that plenty of successful players use our service job scheduling software to keep everything tidy and running like clockwork. The same goes for call management and call scheduling. When you’re faced with the many complexities of juggling calls, you need to deploy your people in a way that uses their time the most effectively – and the most cost-effectively – while maintaining customer service excellence every step of the way. Our call logging software achieves this smoothly, letting you log, monitor, schedule and map field engineer calls easily so your people can do the best possible job. It’s both powerful and intuitive to use, too, which makes such a difference.
3. Customer Relationship Management
Great Customer Relationship Management is crucial these days. Your customers will expect to be handled in a certain way, something that extends into a field service context. To fulfil today’s high expectations you need to provide seamless, smooth, effective and intelligent customer management, without which you will never be able to fulfil customer expectations, never mind please people to the extent they become your advocates, the ultimate in marketing gold dust. Having one place where all your CRM data lives lets you streamline your business operations as well as providing an essential level of data protection. You don’t want to fall foul of the Data protection Act! Our field management system’s Customer Module keeps all your customer data safe in one place, for instant access and great account management.
4. Asset and Stock Control
Asset and stock control matters. Keeping track of stock levels and stock’s whereabouts is another serious challenge you need to address in today’s increasingly competitive business landscape. It’s vital to keep track, especially when your stuff is spread across multiple locations or travelling from A to B. Monitoring stock levels under circumstances like these can be difficult, and spotting excess or low stock can be very challenging indeed. Our field management system’s brilliant stock module makes inventory stock management easy. Multiple locations are handled with ease, and the system can send an alert when stock is getting low. It’s a wholly reliable way to streamline inventory management.
5. Communications and Administration
Good, strong, reliable communications and administration form part of every business success. The devil’s in the detail. Every business involved in field service needs timely, effective two way communications with all of their field service personnel. Effective customer management also falls under this header, where every aspect of customer communications is logged and shared to ultimately build up a clear picture of each client, allowing you to deliver customer service excellence. With numerous calls to handle at any one time, you want to provide top class service at every touch point. Our call logging software lets you do exactly that. You can log, monitor, schedule and map the calls made by your field engineers, and having all the information they need means they can do the best possible job.
6. Invoicing and Quoting
Efficient, accurate invoicing and quoting sits at the heart of every business success, driving a healthy cash-flow It makes perfect sense to raise invoices accurately as well as quickly, and for your field personnel to be able to deliver accurate, timely quotes to customers. It’s all about being responsive. When your admin burden is significant, software designed to lighten the load can be a life-saver. Our RedZebra job invoicing function offers everything you need, blending cutting-edge call management and customer management with easy-to-use online invoicing software. When you want nothing short of painless invoicing and quoting, it’s ideal.
Why choose RedZebra?
Our popular software makes easy work of overcoming a host of common and less common field service management challenges. When you want a system that gives you a multitude of business advantages, is easy to use and does everything it says on the tin, RedZebra Field Service Management Software is the solution. If you’d like to talk about the potential, get in touch.
Email [email protected] or call 01296 350350.
