How Multivariate Routing & Scheduling Untangles Wildly Conflicting Priorities for Field Reps

Whether you realize it or not, every time you leave the driveway, you’re doing multivariate calculations to plan your route and schedule. How long will it take to drive to the market? What if I stop at the dry cleaner first? Can I go to the dry cleaner, stop at the market and still make my appointment on time? Should I go to the dry cleaner after I go to the appointment, or just wait until tomorrow? If I wait, I won’t have that pair of pants I need tonight. Arghh!

From the time we’re children, we are trained to get as much done as efficiently as possible. In our personal life, our ability to juggle schedule and priorities dictates our ability to manage our daily activities. But, in business the impact of efficient management of schedules and tasks is essential to the bottom line, and for field reps, it is the key to success.

For field sales and service reps, and the fleet managers who provide them with vehicles, advanced multivariate calculations are a constant, real-time challenge. Manual scheduling and routing fall short in their ability to address tight schedules, congestion and conflicting priorities. Field teams have to meet customers’ expectations and be on time, every time. Customers don’t care about traffic, the needs of other top-priority customers, vehicle availability or fixed meeting times.

So, in order to ensure customers’ needs are met, and ideally exceeded, sales executives must discerningly prioritize field visits, minimize delays, and manage constantly changing schedules. All these factors, and more, must be accounted for when a sales or service person sets out for a day’s or week’s appointments. Route optimization is an important emerging technology that improves field productivity by minimizing wasted travel time and enabling real-time schedule adjustments.

With such high stakes attached to customer satisfaction in today’s economy, businesses have begun testing different strategies to ensure their field teams’ continual success. Perhaps, the most noteworthy and impactful thus far has been a connected routing and scheduling solution. The benefits of this technology include:

1. It seamlessly integrates with the customer and prospect data housed in a business’s systems (like a CRM or Field Service Management platform), and accounts for real-time updates made by the assigned rep.
2. It’s fueled by a complex routing algorithm that configures solutions based data on a plethora of criteria, including but not limited to: fixed meeting times, variable traffic and weather patterns, optimal routes and customer priorities. Typically, these tools also have the ability to make real-time adjustments as situations change and understand their effect on the overall schedule for the day, the week, or the month.
3. It also usually provides a visualization component as well. When a map can guide reps while they are in the field and allow fleet managers and sales leaders to to track their schedule progress and visits being made, everyone can be on the same page.

The overarching goal of any and all routing and scheduling solutions is to produce the most efficient schedule and routes possible for field team members. And the final affect, lowered costs, better performance and ultimately, increased revenue. When an optimized routing algorithm, that synthesizes a variety of impactful data points, can be applied to a field organization’s strategy, the growth potential is virtually limitless.