Posted by Any time a field technician has idle time but not necessarily it means that they do nothing! But they squander their productive hours in filling out paperwork, sitting in traffic, and other such unproductive activities making your profits will plummet. So how do you know whether your workforces are productive, and helping lift your business instead of hurting it?
Well! Making few tweaks and adjustments will result in far more efficient field service processes and allow your business to serve as many customers as possible. This article discusses some of the most pressing issues that harm field services and provide solutions for optimizing your field technician’s productivity.
- Locating your field technician
Not knowing your techs’ location at any given time during work hours is a big risk. How else will you know who to send out to a job? If you simply call a random technician, you run the risk of him being two hours’ drive away. Someone else might have been only a few minutes. That’s lost billable time. Sure, you can check with everyone when you have just 2-3 techs to manage. But as you grow, this will become impossible to manage properly. However, a real-time tracking device to check on their location will serve as a saviour though.
- Travel Time
The time spent on the road moving from one job to another, or back and forth to the office is often the most detrimental inefficiency for any types of service. Creating efficient schedules is the first step in reducing travel time and ensuring that all technicians are travelling small distances between jobs must be a priority. In addition, bridging the communication channel between the technicians and dispatchers will ease the operations. Instead, taking advantage of GPS routing technologies for route optimization can greatly reduce travel time as well.
- Increase First Time Visit Completion Rates
Although there is a high likelihood that a new task may not be completed on the first-time visit, minimizing the time for the next visit would save a substantial amount of money in the long run. As repeat visits also do not help with client relations and are often regarded as a hindrance or disturbance; Equipping your technicians with the information they need to fix equipment in the first visit not just improves customer satisfaction but helps improve the retention of them in the long run.
- Focus on Providing Better Data Visibility
Manual methods of creating reports in a notebook or spreadsheet may fail to provide efficient results. Often, organisations result in deliver inaccurate invoices that frequently leads to dispute and the company’s free service. Providing your field technicians all relevant data pertaining to the job order at reach, help them practice responsiveness and accuracy.
- Consider A Field Service Management (FSM) Software
Rather than relying on traditional modes of communication and paperwork that bog down field service workers, consider implementing FSM software. These programs aim to optimize not only scheduling but are also equipped with other capabilities like GPS Routing that allow dispatchers to better track and monitor technicians. Instead of making multiple trips to the office, technicians can access schedules online, and dispatchers can make easy alterations and adjustments throughout the day.
Implementing FSM in your field service business will surely turn to be a productivity hack and help any field service company boost their business brand and revenue.