Do you know exactly how productive your field service engineers are? Now more than ever before, knowledge is power and insight means everything. To deliver the best service to customers you need to know where your people are, where your equipment is, how much stock you’ve got left and a whole lot more. You need a clear, accurate picture of everything that’s going on out in the field, away from the premises. We are experts in how to improve field service productivity. If you want to know how to make the most of your field service teams and assets, here are some practical, sensible, actionable productivity tips, designed to maximise it.
What is Field Service Productivity?
What is field service productivity? It’s closely linked to profitability. When you’re able to track your field reps and assign them to the nearest location, you save time and reduce the cost of travel. When you give specific job orders to the technicians who have the most relevant skills, experience and knowledge, you delight your customers. When you know exactly where your stock is and exactly how much stock you have left, you provide an even better service to your customers. Field managers look at all this and more in an effort to increase productivity across the board.
How to Improve Field Service Productivity
Luckily there are plenty of practical ways to boost productivity in field service, everything from allocating tasks intelligently to keeping tabs on your mobile workforce, cutting back on admin and understanding every step of each customer’s journey. Add them all together and you get a proven way to enhance customer communications, make the most of employee talent, and run the field service side of everything wisely, all with increased efficiencies and a better bottom line in mind. Here are just some key, proven tactics.
Mobile Workforce scheduling and task allocation
The efficient management of mobile workforces drives better business, as does allocating tasks appropriately to your field service people. It all improves productivity. Imagine you manage a busy business with a large team of engineers at different locations. Professional-level mobile workforce scheduling and task allocation is a must. Great mobile field service management software lest you hand over projects to the nearest available engineer and record the job details. They can even handle sign-off from customers while working away from the office. Our user-friendly software does all of that and more. It’s perfect for use on any mobile device and provides many excellent features designed for maximum engineer efficiency on a remote basis.
Efficient vehicle and asset utilisation
Picture this. You have lots of vehicles, but you don’t know where they are. It’s impossible to efficiently assign them to people in the field when you also don’t know what condition they’re in. Once you understand exactly where everything is and what condition it’s in, you can confidently assign vehicles to field personnel. The same goes for other asset types, including your stock. Maybe it’s spread across different warehouses, or stacked in different areas of the same warehouse. As you can imagine, a good level of certainty has an immediate positive effect on productivity – you’re not wasting your own time and money, your field service people’s time, or your customers’ time. Thanks to efficient vehicle and asset utilisation, nothing gets lost.
Reduced paperwork and easier administration
The more efficient your paperwork trail, the better. Reduced paperwork and easier administration means every field employee appreciates being able to submit their reports directly from the field. Doing so massively reduces paperwork and administration, which in turn instantly boosts productivity and efficiency. No paperwork lost in between the field and the office, there’s no delay in submitting vital information, no lost orders or misunderstandings, and no duplications. Your customers will actively appreciate your efficiency, awarding you one more valuable tick on the growing list of things you do to please them.
Customer Service history insight
Providing field service personnel with full access to complete customer service histories is enormously beneficial for productivity as well as customer relations. Managing customer data wisely, securely and well is absolutely essential for legendary customer service, and keeping it central allows you to benefit from efficiencies, streamlining business processes and procedures therefore saving time and ultimately improving your bottom line. In a world where data insecurity can kill a business, customer service history insight is a key tool for success. Our RedZebra’s customer module ticks all the boxes. You get instant access to customer information and account management via software you can rely on, from developers you can trust. The result is the best possible quality customer service.
Empowering field service teams to recognise sales opportunities
Giving field service personnel the opportunity to recognise sales opportunities directly from the field and immediately provide customers with quotations is clearly beneficial for productivity. It’s also impressive. When you come in with a fast, accurate quote before your competitors, it makes a very good impression. When you can think it, do it, do it quickly and do it well, you build trust. Empowering field service teams to recognise sales opportunities is what our brilliant quoting software module does for field service-led businesses of every kind. It takes no time to generate quotes, it’s flexible, it’s accurate, and it keeps you in control. You can even create good-looking branded sales collateral in no time thanks to a choice of great templates.
Efficient, timely invoicing
Raising accurate invoices without delay contributes to boosting productivity. Because you’re steering the sales pipeline with confidence, your cash-flow benefits. Poor cash-flow causes many thousands of businesses to fail every year, from start-ups to established companies. Pin down efficient, timely invoicing and you future-proof your business in a fundamental way. Our job invoicing software effortlessly handles your admin, removing the risk of human error, working fast and outputting accurate, timely, branded documentation. Our job invoicing software blends the finest in call handling and customer management in a user-friendly way designed to take the pain, worry and sheer hard work out of invoicing.
Why choose RedZebra?
We’re proud to say it – RedZebra Field Service Management Software is of huge benefit to businesses of every shape and size, enhancing field service productivity and efficiency in all sorts of exciting and creative but always practical ways. Integral invoicing software makes our field service management system so much more useful than many. Shall we talk?
Email [email protected] or call 01296 350350.
