How Small Businesses Can Use Technology to Improve Their Field Service

The amount and diversity of field service companies grows and multiplies each year, following the increasing demand for home-delivered services. Apart from traditional areas, such as telecom, delivery service, engineering, cleaning, and plumbing, field service has expanded into education, healthcare, hospitality, etc. No wonder that competition among small businesses gets fiercer.

In this context, using field service management software (FMS) can be a substantial technological advantage. FMS, especially Planado, incorporates various field operations like assigning and scheduling tasks, dispatching and routing workers to new jobs, communicating with field workers on assignment, managing inventory, and collecting data.

Effective field service management empowers your employees to deliver excellent service to each customer. Let’s see how small businesses can improve their field operations using technology.

Upgrade and guarantee service quality

Today customers expect exceptional service since they can choose between different providers and will not tolerate mediocre quality. So ensuring consistently high quality of services is crucial.

Apart from apparent things like training employees or collecting feedback from customers, consider implementing checklists. They are easy to follow and prevent workers from missing any steps, which helps maintain a consistent quality level.

You can also include taking photos of the completed work as one of the required steps in a checklist so that managers can control quality from the office.

Improve response times

We all got used to technology, making almost everything instantaneous, so customers expect service providers to respond to their needs promptly. Most field-service businesses are therefore struggling to minimize response time.

FMS allows you to keep track of your field workers in real-time. With this information on hand, you can manage task distribution more effectively and spend less time figuring out who can take on an assignment. Besides, if you divide your service area into territories, you can select those workers who are now in the area where the job is located.

Raise income per worker

One of the top objectives of field service providers is to reduce total service delivery costs. There are many ways you can do this, for example, by lowering on-site labor costs and logistics expenses, advancing communications, and improving working conditions for employees.

When field workers are relieved of administrative burdens, have full access to essential resources, communicate effectively, and receive schedules and updates on-the-go, they can spend more time focusing on helping customers, which leads to increased customer satisfaction, retention, and profits.

Optimize workflow

By optimizing field service processes, businesses can streamline workforce operations, remove unnecessary tasks from the workflow, and simplify life both for field workers and administrative staff.

FMS solutions help managers optimize routing, improve delivery times, and give visibility into field operations. For example, you can see where your employees are at the moment, what task they’re working on, what’s the current status, and how long it might take.

Using FMS is also beneficial for your field workers since they can rely on the app when figuring out optimal routes, matching checklists, and sending reports without lots of paperwork.

Work on customer loyalty

Customer loyalty is a key component of a successful field service business. To earn customers’ loyalty, your entire team must work together to create an exceptional customer experience. You’ll need to address many factors, from improving service quality to establishing effective communication with clients.

Both managers and field workers are responsible for building long-term relationships with clients, so they need to be attentive, polite, and helpful. However, you can easily automate a significant part of client interaction using FMS. For example, the system can send out notifications to clients to confirm an order, remind them of an appointment, collect feedback, etc.