Field Service Management Software: Get your Field staff start loving their jobs again
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Here is a not-so-difficult dilemma – would you rather be paying your employees for hours spent providing prompt service to customers, or for time spent on tedious paperwork and manual record-keeping?
The answer is a no-brainer – the more clients that a company can cater to on a daily basis, the better a reputation it gets and the more it can flourish. Field Service Management helps companies with a mobile workforce achieve exactly that: higher productivity, more satisfied customers and less overtime for employees.
Automation replaces manual work
Manual work is not only time consuming, but also prone to error. Scheduling, for example, becomes inefficient and does not take all the factors affecting an employee into consideration. This can lead to employees wasting billable hours and having to spend time unnecessarily commuting to far-apart locations.
As opposed to this, features like auto-scheduling in Field Service Management tools (like FieldEZ’s solutions) help maximise the service successfully provided to clients. At the same time, wastage of resources is minimized by taking factors like an employee’s location, urgency of a job, cancelled jobs in an employee’s schedule, etc. into account.
Location tracking in real time is a feature that all good scheduling software has. It keeps the central office updated on the movements of their mobile workforce and helps optimise appointments and the time spent travelling. Home locations of employees are parameters too, and jobs at the end of the day are assigned such that they lie on the same route. This helps members of the workforce balance their professional and personal lives better.
Valuing resources amidst automation
Skill is also an important aspect that Field Service Management considers when scheduling appointments (which can be overlooked in manual work). A worker assigned a job that necessitates his particular area of expertise will naturally excel at it, which serves as an additional motivator for employees to perform well.
Safety of employees is also a major concern in field service. Workers may be placed in potentially dangerous situations during repairs and other services which may pose a safety hazard (e.g. elevator repairs). Field Service Management software which can notify dispatch about the whereabouts of a worker as well as send out information to the central office in case of an emergency provides employees with security. It reduces the risk of accidents and subsequent job changes by workers who feel that their safety is not a priority.
Facilitating Field representatives
Field Service Management tools also provide employees with all the information required for a job – saving time that would otherwise be spent in redundant research due to unavailability of relevant data. Field employees can update inventory, place orders for extra parts, manage expenses and issue invoices, all in real time. The offline mode in Field Service Management software lets employees make important entries regardless of network availability as early as possible, saving data and updating databases once they are online again.
Field Service Management software ensures that customers do not get neglected in case the job cannot be completed the first time around. Customer inputs can be taken in the form of e-signatures if the task is completed. If not, the scheduling software can immediately plan for further appointments and rectify whatever prevented the completion of the job the first time around. Thus, Field Service Management is crucial towards ensuring happier clients and likewise, happier employees.
– By Vaishnavi Kulkarni
FieldEZ Technologies Pvt Ltd
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