In today’s competitive market, a company realizes that using paper to manage the activities of field service technicians is no longer enough to ensure you can provide increasingly demanding customers with responsive, efficient, and effective service.
In an organization, a business manager spends a lot of time thinking about new strategies and how to implement them for optimizing the process and enhancing the overall business growth.
How can you increase turnover by reducing costs? How can you make your existing happy and retain them and differentiate them from the cut-throat competition? And finally, how can you keep up with the digital transformation underway in your industry?
At first glance, all of these issues are crucial and it will cost you at least a few sleepless nights. But, there is a way to enhance both activities of the technicians in the field and the profitability of your company. It’s called field service management software or after-sales service software, and it can help you solve a lot of your problems.
Here are 10 great reasons to start using field service management software.
1- Superior customer satisfaction
Optimize the entire lifecycle of service activities with well designed best field service management software from the time the customer makes the request through to the final invoice. When the after-sales service software includes automated capabilities, it can significantly minimize customer wait times by assigning service tasks to technicians who are available and have the right skill set for the assigned job and by forecasting spare parts requirements.
With this type of good solution, you can put your service technicians in the best possible position to successfully resolve the issue on their first visit to improve your first-time-fix rate and make your customer happy. In a study published by the American firm, Aberdeen, customer satisfaction increases by more than 20% when the issue is solved on the first visit of the service technician. Online field service management software is an indispensable tool to achieve this goal.
Read More – How to track sales activities with Sales Management Software
2- Increased turnover
In a business, there is an intangible rule that says it’s easier to keep existing customers than to win new ones. Improving the level of customer satisfaction immediately strengthens the loyalty of the customer. As a result, happy and satisfied customers are more likely to spread the word, and good word of mouth leads to new customers. It’s a virtuous circle.
You can centralize all of your customer details and ensure that it’s always available anytime, anywhere to technicians with cloud-based field service management software. Technicians have a better understanding of customers’ data and their equipment, they can respond more effectively and efficiently to each customer issue.
Field service technicians can even help to increase business by offering customers additional services. If the customer expresses interest in a particular service, the technician can immediately send the information back to the sales team so they can quickly make a proposal/quotation and share it with the customer.
3- Greater efficiency, lower costs
As we mentioned, field service management software lets you set up the scheduling of jobs and provide each customer with the best service technician.
How does it work? Well, let’s use SalesBabu after-sales service software as an example. With this software, you can assign the right job to the right technician at the right time. To do this, it considers:
- Technician location
- Technician skills set
- The parts and tools with the service technician
Making optimal use of human resources is a strategic advantage in a service-focused world. And online CRM software for the service industry or field service management software is an indispensable tool to ensure service is provided with maximum efficiency and lower costs with happier customers.
4- Helpful modern technologies
For a few years now we have been hearing that businesses are undergoing digital transformation. At some point, it becomes important that every business, including those in the service industry, accepts and joins this digital revolution or risks endangering their future. In fact, continuing to work on paper when the other industry is moving to digitization, in the medium term, the best way to go out of business.
Service companies, by deploying field service management software, equip themselves to compete and to deal with customers who are demanding increasingly high quality of service.
CRM for the service industry also provides access to the technologies that are revolutionizing the way business is done:
- Assigning and scheduling jobs to technician
- Augmented reality for solving problem on-site
- The IoT (Internet of Things) and predictive analysis to anticipate breakdowns
- Virtual reality to trained & skilled technicians
In the industry providing field service, these modern technologies are no longer science fiction. The future has arrived and deployed in the service industry.
5- Delighted technicians
In today’s competitive market, there’s a generational change taking place in the field service industry domain. In service, more and more young generation people are coming, and veterans are becoming increasingly rare. And the way the job is seen and the technology and tools that are used are also changing fast. In a cut-throat competitive job market, it’s increasingly difficult to recruit technicians with the right skills set and retain them.
Today, most of the service technicians are digital natives and are used to using mobile applications and smartphones and expect to do the same at work. Technicians of the modern generation will not be content to work with lots of paper, adhere to rigid schedules, or lose time due to poorly planned travel routes.
In today’s digital world, in service companies, technicians are the first ones to request their management to deploy field service management software because it:
- Makes their lives far easier
- Minimize their margin of error
- Minimizes administrative processing requirements
- Improve efficiency
- Empower and enable technician to focus more on core business activities and value-added tasks
6- Better cash flow
With an online after-sales service management software, you can use pre-filled and rules-based forms to collect more reliable data from the field. The ability to collect more reliable field data and to send the electronic forms directly to your billing system with a single click considerably accelerates the billing process. Companies that previously required a few weeks to invoice customers can now send invoices as soon as the service is completed. Quick invoicing means quick payments. Finally, it’s good for cash flow and it’s all possible with the move to an online field service management software.
7- Detailed activity monitoring
Best field service management software provides attractive dashboards that enable you to monitor the progress of key performance indicators (KPI). With a global and detailed view of the activities of field technicians, you can make smart decisions at the right times. And you are in a better situation to meet contractual commitments for guaranteed service times, repair times, and first-time fix rates.
Read More – How Your CRM System Helps You Align Your Sales & Marketing Strategy
8- Superior technician safety
Field engineers or technicians are often required to work in complex, and even risky environments that require special precautions. With high-quality field service management software that includes a mobile app, service engineers can review a checklist of safety rules, equipment requirements, and security measures before they start a job so they can successfully complete their tasks without taking undue risks.
9- More secure data
In addition to service engineers’ physical security during their job, data security is also equally important. Service companies and their technicians often have sensitive information about customers.
Consider a company that specializes in installing electronic security systems in banks. It’s crucial that customer data and floor plans showing system locations do not fall into the mischievous hands. You can use secure servers with field service management software, and other means to protect digital data. This can not be done with paper, and it puts both the service company and its customers at high risk for data leaks.
In few industries, providers of field service must meet and follow security standards that prohibit the use of paper. To succeed in these markets, it’s very important and necessary to follow digital processes and be able to offer certified levels of security.
10- Higher quality of service
Finally, deploying after-sales service management application or field service management software helps service providing companies to improve the quality of service they offer to their customers. In a cut-throat competitive economic environment, this is an essential and important capability.
Teams ranging from schedulers to service engineers can collect and share deeper insight into each customer. With the field service management software, you can see the history of every service call completed at customer sites so you can see statistical trends, metrics, and other data that helps you know and understand what aspects contribute to the success or failure of a particular type of service. Ultimately, you can serve you a customer with better service and keep them satisfied.
