Offices all around the world are constantly changing as new technology and administration styles progress. You might not even know it, but disruption is happening all the time and it’s influencing your business.
In this day and age, and with the inventions of smart phones, tablets, and ever-growing mobile networks with the soon to be 5G roll-out, it sometimes feels like we can never switch off from our field work, both managers and the employees are almost always ‘on’.
Field engineers are often working in multiple locations within the same day, the modern office is turning into the mobile office, this is especially important for industries like trades and construction, whether their work is reactive or planned, it is almost certainly taking part in the field.
The convenience of having a mobile office creates several new changes and challenges, customers are expecting a more rapid service, your staff need to be tracked, and work should be scheduled intelligently. These are some of the reasons why the field industry is opting for cloud-based solutions like FieldFusion.
Challenge 1: Tracking staff
A good field service manager should always know the following:
⦁ Employees location
⦁ The job they are performing
⦁ How long the jobs are taking
⦁ Employees availability
Within a mobile workforce, knowing where your employees are can of course create difficulties. Cloud-based software allows field managers to overcome this, all they need to do is log into the software and find the employees details and see their location in real-time via satellite and GPS, as well as being able to add new jobs, confirm the date and time, input where the job is, and assign the relevant engineer to the work.
Challenge 2: Optimise service delivery
Ensuring you have the correct people in the field to manage your existing and incoming jobs is a big challenge with field management. Our cloud-based solution gives managers the power to know where their employees are, and how to prioritise every job that comes in. Employees out in the field won’t need to waste time doing paperwork back at the office, or will they ever lose valuable time by needing extra tools or parts for a job. Managers will be able to make informed decisions on whether additional contractors would be required to finish a job on time.
Challenge 3: Improving customer service
Having a rapid yet efficient response to customer service is one of the biggest challenges in the field service industry today. Before software like ours, engineers would have to create invoices back at the office and then send them to the customers for payment. Our cloud-based software will allow engineers to create invoices and receipts on customers sites using their mobile device, and customers can pay immediately. This quick and convenient utility is just one of the features that can help your company to deliver unbeatable levels of customer service.