The field service industry depends on providing exceptional customer service for repeat order bookings. For this, it is important to implement field service management best practices across effective scheduling, managing field service technicians, routing, etc.
It is not viable to manually manage field service operations as it’s time-consuming and error-prone. Digitization becomes imperative after certain business growth.
Smart service businesses opt for field service management software – read more to understand why, and how you can get started.
What is field service management software?
Field service management (FSM) software helps streamline and automate manual field service operational tasks. Today, this goes beyond manual data entry thanks to artificial intelligence.
Field Service Management apps can automatically schedule jobs, analyze customer data to design marketing campaigns, or even manage customer support tickets.
There are 3 key strategic benefits of adopting the software for managing field services:
- Makes operations real-time: software improves your response time to jobs and interactions with customers. It helps manage the workforce in real time. It also helps communicate with
- Quick decision making: field service management software is capable to understand large amounts of customer, worker, or operations data. It is possible to generate reports and analyze data over a period of time to identify patterns and steer business with insights gained.
- Improved business visibility: a field service business gains visibility on the ground operations at the job site due to mobile app accessibility. It is possible to track workers, share their location with customers, or communicate in real time for updates.
Beyond manual task automation – 4 field service management software use cases to streamline business operations
Field service management software helps your teams become more efficient and improve service delivery. Let us explore 4 key use cases to understand this:
Compliance management
Field service businesses often engage in remote work – which means, they have to adhere to local labor laws. To ensure they have sufficient proof for audits during inspections or taxation filings, an FSM software’s workforce data comes in handy.
It tracks time spent by workers on the job site, while also determining productive time in working. This helps you compensate the workers, and also file the same with authorities.
Field service management software can also manage contracts digitally, including receiving digital signatures. It can also help implement contract terms and ensure your workers or customers are reminded of the same as the job proceeds.
Automated scheduling
Scheduling and dispatching the right field service worker for the right job gets complex as business grows. A field service management software can understand the job details and consider customers’ past interactions with your business. Then, based on field service technician data, it can allocate the work automatically to ensure better first-time fix rates.
It also optimizes routes to enable the field service technicians to reach the customers on time. Using GPS and tracking real-time worker location, it can find the shortest route with less traffic, saving the worker’s time.
Efficient inventory management
Many field service businesses tend to be seasonal in nature. For example, if you’re an HVAC service provider – you will have more orders for ACs during summer, and heaters during winter.
These two jobs require a different set of equipment and labor skill sets. Such varied demand can cause wastage in inventory or increase the bench time of the tools used.
A field service management software will allocate resources based on what is available versus the job at hand. It will also automatically place an order with the vendors to make sure your business does not face any delay due to resource unavailability during peak season. During the off-season, such orders won’t get placed.
Resolving customer tickets
With artificial intelligence-enabled field service management software, your first point of contact with customers could be an AI chatbot. It can help customers resolve simple queries using existing documentation available within your company. It can also assign priority to the tickets so that your teams can focus on getting them resolved first.
Experience the latest trending technologies for field service management
What does an AI co-pilot look like for managing field service operations? Is it possible to track field service technicians when they leave the job site?
All this is possible with Zuper – a field service management software that comes with the latest Generative AI and geo-fencing technology. Book a demo today to experience how technology is a game-changer for field service operations.