Field service management is a complex process, and there are many moving parts that are part of any supervisor or business owner’s considerations at all times. The more you optimize and use best practices, the better your company’s performance will be each day. These best practices and optimizations can help with customer satisfaction, as well as improve daily workflows for the better.
Field service management companies can benefit from a wide array of improvements that can be leveraged in today’s highly tech-friendly reality. You should never have to struggle with old-fashioned work processes when you have so many really great options to improve and streamline your business right to hand.
Field Service Management Best Practices
1. Know Your Goals For Your Field Service Company
Don’t just pick up technology because other companies are using it. There are so many software products and other field service management tools out there that it can be easy to just pick what other people are using and hope for the best. However, this can lead to confusion and frustration for your staff and your customers.
You need to be sure that you know what your goals are related to each improvement that you make. You will have a better time identifying which kinds of products and solutions are right for your needs when you know what your goals are, and you will be less likely to be taken in by promises of what these tools can do. Having a clear direction when you are shopping for optimizations and business solutions can help separate the forest from the trees.
Remember as well that optimization is only as good as the specificity of your goals. You can buy any software product and hope for the best without making any changes or requests to have it tailored to your needs, but why would you do this? You will get so much more out of your purchased and applied solutions if you make sure that they work hard for your needs and have been built to tackle your daily workflows reliably and correctly.
2. Consider In-Field Efficiency
No changes that you make should detract from efficiency. If you are not sure if a plan, a product, or a change will improve your overall business processes and make things go more smoothly every day, you should hold off. Making these decisions in a vacuum is almost always a mistake, and you will probably need to work with managers or supervisors, and staff to make sure that you are getting the most efficient resolution in place for your needs.
The whole goal of field service management is to make things work better and to allow your business to thrive and your customers to have a great experience with your company. Efficiency is at the heart of all of these decisions that are made correctly. If you fail to think about efficiency, it’s very easy to actually make your situation more complex and less effective every day.
3. Consider That Teams Are in the Field
While it seems obvious, you do need to remember that you have staff that are working in the field. This means that anything that can be done from the office should be possible on remote devices of various kinds. This allows your field service teams to work hard for the customers they are helping without having to work blindly and hope for the best.
From allowing clocking in and out remotely to ensuring that field service teams know what they need to do for each client at a glance, you will improve every part of your business if you keep your teams in the field in mind. Since these are the people that you are sending to actually interface with clients, they need to be armed with the information and access necessary to service client needs correctly and efficiently.
When you use the right field services management software tools, you will empower your field service technicians to take care of clients with ease. This will improve everything from communication between staff and the home office to communicate between clients and your teams of workers. Remember the people in the field and work backward from there for the best results with your efforts to change and improve your business.
4. Keep an Eye on Flexibility
Being flexible is one of the most essential aspects of operating a successful company that manages field service work. Things can change on a dime in this kind of business, and you might have to recall teams from a service visit because the client canceled or you could require teams to tackle emergency services in between jobs. There are any number of things that can alter the nature of the work that needs to be done each day at your company and being flexible can make these bumps in the road no big deal.
When you are using the right business solutions to support these kinds of changes to plans and other needs on the fly, you can improve your customer service and make your staff much happier with their jobs. The more access that your teams in the field have to client information and to see the daily schedule, the easier flexibility is.
If you use a customer portal, you can stay connected with clients in real-time and be sure that everyone knows what is going on with a job from start to finish. Some of the costliest aspects of running these kinds of businesses are missed connections between staff and customers. Being able to cut down on missed meeting times, poor communication, and other common pitfalls on the customer service side of this kind of work can help your business to thrive.
5. Field Employee Training Matters
When you choose a software tool or make a change to a workflow, make sure that you are actually teaching employees to follow these new guidelines. So many companies make assumptions about the level of understanding that staff has related to these kinds of changes. If you are not taking the time to teach, train, or explain these things to your staff, you will be risking issues with customer service and with the timeliness of response to customer needs.
Staff who are not clear on the processes that they are supposed to be using can also make major errors that can lead to lost company data, upset clients, or missed opportunities to provide effective support for business needs. Employee training should be a key aspect of all of your company’s processes, no matter how big or small they are.
Changes can also spark review and discussion about other aspects of the work and processes that your company engages in every day. This kind of communication is key to successful companies and happy customers.
6. Assign Experts to Support Staff and Customers
It is always a good idea to make sure that you assign subject matter experts to assist clients with more advanced requests and to help staff who are in the field with complex questions. When there is no one to go to about the things that are not working as expected, often these problems simply slip through the cracks. You cannot afford to leave customers or team members hanging when work needs to be done.
You can have a general call center for basic questions, but any complex issues should be taken to the right person with the expertise to be resolved carefully and correctly. This kind of oversight for company issues or changes to regular workflows can make a big impact on your company’s efficiency and operating procedures. Having subject matter experts on hand helps keep resolutions flowing and also avoids issues with frustration and delays.
7. Choose Software to Help You Out
If you are still using old-fashioned methods to keep track of business needs and processes and client data and billing, you are missing out. There are so many really great ways to track the processes that make your business tick these days. Picking a field service management software tool can bring your company into the modern era with shining colors.
You will be able to track everything to do with client accounts, contract management, and ticket resolution inside this kind of application. Without this kind of solution in the mix, you might have knowledge silos that are threatening your company’s long-term ability to operate smoothly and other kinds of problems to do with billing, customer satisfaction, and client management.
Field service management software is a key aspect of any successful company. It is never too late to upgrade your business processes and record-keeping to make sure that things run efficiently and properly. Make sure that you look at lots of options for the software style that you want to employ. There are all kinds of ways to optimize these products for your specific use. You can craft a business solution that will work hard for you every day so your staff can be more effective and customer service can be at the forefront of daily operations.
8. Be Sure Not to Resist Change
It can be easy to be resistant to change. We all like our routines, and you might not think that there is any need to try and improve your business processes or workflows. However, if there are customer service issues going on or your staff is complaining about problems that are not being resolved, you need to consider whether or not being stuck in a rut is a good idea. If you can make changes that will improve your workflows and make customer service better, then you need to be willing to make the leap to tackle these changes.
Being willing to embrace change can be the difference between running a successful business and running one that doesn’t thrive. Old-fashioned ideas and practices can be a big downside to many companies and there are lots of people who will not work for a company that does not try to improve and evolve. You might be missing out on new hires that are skilled and effective and also missing out on chances to wow your customers just because you are not willing to embrace the possibility of change.
9. Change Workflows to be More Structured
Sometimes the biggest stumbling block for field service companies is a lack of clear structure to workflows. You will need to be sure that you are not leaving your staff in the dark about how to do their jobs. Sometimes teams are not aware of the way that their work affects other people in the chain of operations, which makes sure that tickets get resolved and clients get cared for properly.
Being sure that you have made the steps of job processes clear and predictable will also improve the chances that your customers will have a consistent experience when they work with you. Your teams will know how to work with one another more effectively as well, and things like turnaround time on invoices will improve.
Structured workflows are often the hallmark of an effective company, and you should be sure that you are willing to take this kind of project in hand. It might take a little while to get a process documented and built correctly for each part of your company, but once these items have been taken care of, you will see huge improvements in your business operations.
10. Optimize Your Field Service Company
There is never a time when discussion about ways to optimize business processes should not be welcome. Over time, workflows can change and this can mean that they need to be looked at again for ways to improve them. You might also need to consider that certain parts of your work on tickets or on customer satisfaction tasks are not actually necessary.
Cutting out steps that are not needed and beefing up areas of attention that need to be focused on can help to provide a good client experience. This can also make your internal company processes more effective, and it can cut down on miscommunication between teams within your organization. Streamlining, improving, and optimizing is always a good thing to do when there are bottlenecks or other kinds of problems that your business needs to address.
11. Talk to Your Teams
Companies that do not consider the advice or the input of the teams who work for them are always at risk of making things worse that could have been made better. The management and operational side of your company needs to work with the staff who are actually in the field getting things done to be sure that everyone is on the same page. These teams need to work together on resolutions to issues and suggestions for ways to improve processes and company workflows.
When you bring your teams of workers into the discussion of ways to make your company run better, you empower them to have a voice and a commitment to the company as well. Everyone wants to be heard, and making major changes to your business without speaking with staff can be a key way to upset people and risk them leaving their jobs. You also might be missing out on important information that you need to know about in order to make wise decisions about company management.
While you cannot make everyone happy every time you make changes, you can try to be sure that you are taking the requests of your employees into consideration as you make changes to their daily workflows.
12. Try it Out First
Sometimes changes are so big that the best way to employ them is to test them first. You can test software in a controlled environment without changing all of your business workflows and you can have specific employees who are willing to test out changes that you want to make to business processes. Easing into big changes can be beneficial for a host of reasons, and you will be making a very informed decision if you decide to make a company-wide change that you have tested first.
This applies to software solutions above many other things. Make sure that you never consider upgrading to a software product if you cannot see how it works, and test it out first. This kind of change is a huge one and often quite costly, so you need to be sure that you are in love with this tool and how it works before you dive in. Testing is always the best route when it comes to big decisions, and you will not regret taking the time to add this essential step to your business operational processes along the way.
13. Take Advantage of Perks
When you are looking into an upgrade to new software, make sure that you look into the ways that this software can add value to your daily workflows and processes. You will need to be sure that you can customize options within the tool and that you can access other benefits that you might never have considered in the past. There are lots of ways to make software solutions work really hard for your company, and you should never be afraid to look into the potential perks of using these kinds of tools.
You might not end up liking an offered perk or change, but at least be sure that you are open to checking it out. This kind of benefit might never have even occurred to you and you will be cheating yourself out of big benefits to your company’s operation by refusing to even look at perks and improvements that might make a big impact on your company’s daily processes.
Field Service Management and Operation Can be Made Simple
While there are lots of moving parts and things to consider when you are managing or running a field service company, you can use all of these tips and tricks to make sure that you are not missing out on benefits to your business. From using the right software tools to making sure that you are not missing chances to leverage internal skills inside your company, you need to ensure that you never miss a chance to improve your business.
Modern solutions can help replace old-fashioned record-keeping and workflows. You can make huge changes for your company by bringing in the right technology and best practices to allow your company to thrive.
