The beauty of field service management software is that it can ease your fears of change because most of the work you do will only change slightly.
Don’t believe it? Read on.
What if a technician could walk into a corporate office, and focus entirely on fixing the coffee machine that keeps shooting espresso everywhere, rather than taking notes? Adopting field service software won’t affect your employee’s day-to-day duties, but will give them plenty of time to focus on customer satisfaction because they’ll be able to quickly enter data about the service encounter.
Even with advances in technology, field service work must be done in person. However, with field service management software, dispatching is just a matter of dragging and dropping a pin. Dispatchers can send technicians with the specific skills required for a job, and reallocate techs if the originally dispatched tech is delayed.
It’s never fun being stuck in traffic when trying to reach a client. By including maps that show technicians’ current locations along with routing information that gives them the speediest route, field service management software helps technicians get to customers faster.
Ever sent a technician out to a client only to discover that a part needs to be installed to fix the problem, but the part is either at a warehouse or not in stock? Repeated visits to a customer waste time and resources. To solve this problem, field service management software lets you track inventory at warehouses and service trucks in real time. If an on-site technician doesn’t have a spare part, the software can be used to check a nearby colleague’s stock or the part can be ordered directly from the app.
Today, going paperless has never been so easy. With field service management software, you can toss out the carbon copies that were necessary for clients’ signatures. Instead, customers can give satisfaction ratings and sign on a technician’s mobile device on-site, then a detailed service report can be automatically emailed to the customer.
Do you sometimes want to be like Jerry Maguire to a client and yell, “Show me the money”? Field service management software makes invoicing clients faster and easier. Since service reports are entered in real time and synced in the cloud to your ERP system, the person in the back office will already have the data needed to invoice the client. The faster an invoice goes out, the faster a client can pay.
It’s one thing to sit down and write report after report once you’ve finished all the service calls for the day. It’s another to complete reports as you go, with no need to block out administrative time to complete them. Thanks to real-time analytics, reports are a breeze with field service software. Utilizing an easy-to-use analytics dashboard, you can track performance and gain insights that will help make your business more profitable.
Lastly, if you’re like my relative and imagine that using field service software means redoing your entire tech set up, fear not. With cloud-based field service software, it isn’t necessary to install an expensive IT infrastructure. Your ERP system will stay the same, as field service software integration is easily done within existing ERP systems or can even be used as a stand-alone version!