Seven Reasons to Embrace Connected Field Service
- 1
Reduce the number of customer complaints
Customers want more, better and faster. Service needs to be extremely customer-focused, personal and a solid relationship must be established. The number of complaints must be reduced by improving the relationship and by giving the customer real-time insight into the planning (Customer Engagement).
- 2
Minimalize operational inefficiencies
Opportunities for improvement are often missed when insight into the process is limited. When an issue in the process is noticed, it is often difficult to localize the exact point of the process that caused the issue or how to improve the problem without interrupting the entire process. The most optimal circumstance is when there is clear insight into all processes throughout the organization.
- 3
Plan field service efficiently
Automating your processes and leveraging optimized scheduling functions, allows you to make the best use of resources and to meet service-level agreements. Without automation, there are often long waiting times between appointments and field service resources have inefficient travel times, causing costs and CO2 emissions to increase. Such automation meets customers’ needs, enabling them to plan visit appointments 24/7 in an efficient way.
- 4
Ensure up-to-date insightin the planning stage
When there are last minute changes in times or routes during the workday, confusion can occur and mistakes can easily be made and/or appointments can be missed. Adding a route optimization function to the existing planning board is an ideal solution.
- 5
Be clear on who manages the planning
This is often a difficult matter within businesses. Do the engineers carry out their own planning? Is planning centralized? Or can these options be combined? Combining the needs of the engineer, customer and the business is the best way to manage planning.
- 6
Guarantee quality of subcontractors
If there is no insight into the quality of service delivered by subcontractors to your customers, there is no way of finding out if there is an issue. There will be no chance to resolve it in order to ensure future improvement. A service provider needs to be clear and confident on the quality of work provided by their subcontractors.
- 7
Create an annual service plan with ease
Sometimes, having minimal insight into fixed contract agreements and ad-hoc work delivered by employees, can make annual planning challenging. The ideal situation would be to automatically create an annual plan in which contract agreements and potential ad-hoc work are combined easily.