Field service agents or technicians struggle to keep to their schedules due to a variety of reasons. Sometimes the issues on site are different or more complicated than anticipated, the equipment is incorrect, or they aren’t allowed site access. These are all things that can be avoided if real-time data is available to them throughout their day.

First time resolution is an important element of customer relationship management. The longer it takes to resolve an issue, the more the customer suffers, the more frustrated they get with your service.  First time resolution rates don’t only gauge customer satisfaction, but brand loyalty and profitability too. 

If your call centre or support team is being inundated with calls, it usually means that there is a big challenge with other parts of your business. Customer-facing field service technicians are often the cause of many complaints if they aren’t equiped with the equipment, knowledge or real-time updates they need, to be efficient or on-time.

How often do technicians get to site only to see that they don’t have the correct equipment for the job at hand? Probably all the time, right? Technicians often don’t have the right information about what they need to do. Imagine if all this information was at their fingertips? They would get more jobs done, more efficiently.

Work orders, invoices and daily schedules are all documents that field service agents need to carry around from site to site. Some get lost, confused with eachother, and left behind. Automating and taking all these manual documents to mobile applications takes away the worry and time it takes to organise them.

Do your field service agents need to come back to dispatch every time they finish one job? How much time and petrol does this waste? Having an automatically updated mobile schedule allows technicians to go from one area to another, even when jobs have been moved around, cancelled or reprioritised.

How can you improve operational effectiveness and ROI? IoT allows for real-time, remote condition monitoring. Instead of monthly, quarterly or yearly servicing, businesses can rely on IOT to flag any issues with the machinery and dictate when maintenance is necessary. Pre-empting equipment failure protects against larger costs of service downtime or breakages.

Inventory management is critical as it gives businesses insight into items such as property, goods in stock, or merchandise of a truck on the road.  Field service has the capability to; give you real-time easy access to inventory lists, manage reciepts of merchandise, easily return merchandise and transfer inventory from site to warehouse to vehicle.

Know where your technicians are, what equipment they have with them and their movements from one client to another. This solves the big challenge of visibility and the time it takes for issues to be resolved.

Building a centralised knowledge base gives management, technicians and dispatch insights and best practices into consistent processes. This repository of information could be training manuals, how-to videos, step-by-step resolution advice, highly specific directions or best practice guides when interacting with customers. These can be secured and accessible to specified individuals.

Customers that are kept in the loop during service down-times and other issue management are often the happiest customers. Being transparent and open to customers about exactly what is happening is your best chance for a good customer experience. It is even possible to allow customers to see real-time technician movements.

Having a fully functioning field service team, efficiently servicing customers with the correct equipment, preventing machinery failures before they happen, giving customers the right information, going to clients in a systematic manner and managing inventory, increases productivity for the entire organisation