“I’m Too Busy to Improve My Business”
It’s amazing the number of times I hear executives from successful, respected organizations make a statement like this. They’ll say, “We’re going into our busy quarter, so we’ll have to look into making changes later,” or “My field personnel is too busy servicing calls to learn something new.” The problem is, during the time improvement is delayed, the business is leaking revenue opportunities.
In companies with field service employees, there are many ways the business can benefit from a streamlined operation process. It is common, however, for many to manage their workforce through an inefficient paper process. This results in missed opportunities for additional service appointments per day. In addition, a low first-time fix rate is indicative of field service workers not having all of the information they need for calls, such as access to customer history, and having to make unnecessary trips back to the office to parts, paperwork, and other information.
Businesses that have taken the time to modernize their field service operations and integrate technology to connect the field with their back office have realized improvements in field efficiency. This has not only created a more satisfied workforce, but ultimately it has improved customer satisfaction (CSat), resulting in additional opportunities for additional revenue.
A customer of FieldAware that specializes in IT Outsourcing has 440 field service workers and 20 back office personnel. By taking the time to optimize their operations, they’ve achieved 10% growth over their goal per month. Another customer, that’s in the materials handling industry, has 17 workers in the field and 10 back office personnel. They realized 25% growth over their goal per month. Such growth is as a result of streamlining operations to optimize truck rolls, improving first-call fix numbers, and providing the correct information and tools to field service workers, which helps them to identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
So how do you justify prioritizing field service management for your business? Your business is missing growth opportunities if:
- Call-to-service time is causing customers to wait too long, affecting CSat
- Poor optimization in dispatch and scheduling, causing unnecessary truck rolls
- First-time fix rate is low
- Lack of visibility into field service operations is resulting in poor forecasting
- Low upsell and cross-sell numbers are coming from the field
- Field employees are driving to/from the office just to drop off or pick up paperwork
- Work orders are getting lost, destroyed or are illegible
- Information is being re-keyed into disparate back-office systems
- Customer churn rate is high
If your business is experiencing these challenges, each day that you don’t make changes is costing you money, and potentially putting you at a competitive disadvantage for your market. Automating field service operations can have significant impact on both customer and employee satisfaction. This not only helps to reduce churn, but improves customer retention, freeing up resources to focus on growth.
FieldAware gets to know your business, what its needs are, what challenges you are facing, and what your goals are so that what may seem to be a big step is as easy for you as possible. Training is provided and support is there to help you transition from a paper process to automated field service management so you can begin to realize its benefits and meet your growth goals as soon as possible.
The cost of not evaluating the performance of your service operations is significant. However, by taking the step to optimize your field service management operations through automation, your business will be able to capitalize on opportunities that provide a better experience to your both yor employees and your customers.
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