As the owner of a business that operates through field services, you surely acknowledge that the efficiency and productivity of your field workforce can make or break the quality of the services offered by your business. Different technical tools and technologies are available nowadays to improve the efficiency of your team members so that they can be more productive and produce better results in their job roles.
One such tool is Field Service scheduling software. This blog will discuss the field scheduling software, understand it, and learn how it helps unlock the high-velocity Field Service team.
What is Field service scheduling software?
Field service scheduling software is an open platform that streamlines field operational workflows and empowers the field service team with adaptable practices.
As the name suggests, it is a tool for managing the work schedules of the field technicians. The software is designed for Service Managers or supervisors. The manager uses the software to make the schedules for the entire team in a smart way. The software facilitates automatic job scheduling. It can automatically identify the nearest available skilled technician for a job and accordingly does skill-based job scheduling.
The software has a database where it can scan the skills of the technicians. Then, location tracking identifies the current locations of the field technicians and traces the existing scheduled appointments of the technicians. This way, the software has the complete data of who is working at which location, what is his next scheduled appointment, what are his skill sets, and accordingly, the software can identify who is the next rightly skilled available technician for a particular job. Doing this calculation manually can take much time yet fails to ensure accuracy.
Whereas at a click of one button, the software can do this repetitive task again and again with complete accuracy every time. It ensures that a job has been assigned to a technician who can reach the job site at the earliest, who has the skills to accomplish the job in the first visit itself, and who has the time to attend the job without fail or any other sort of scheduling conflict.
Thus a scheduling software helps in improving the efficiency of the team members and the field operations by ensuring that the jobs have been assigned to the right resources.
How the scheduling software delivers more value to the clients
Infield services each of the technicians are deployed to work at different job locations. In a way, they work in silos. Field Service scheduling software breaks down the silos while meeting the unique needs of each technician. It empowers the service manager and every field employee to set up the project schedules quickly in a comprehensively productive way and helps everyone save time without losing the agility to work across different job locations.
Job scheduling improves the first visit effectiveness among the technicians. Some field technicians may not have the right experience to do a particular job or may not be trained to execute the job. If a technician is assigned a job beyond his skill set, then certainly the technician fails to resolve the issue on his first visit. In such a scenario, the technician provides the client with another appointment for the service. Then as per the requirement, either a new technician is sent for the job, or the same technician connects with his seniors to understand how to resolve the problem and then pays a repeat visit to the job site and resolves the issue. In either case, it is an overhead expense.
These kinds of incidents are very common in field services like Maintenance Services, HVAC services, etc. However, such incidents can be very easily avoided if the jobs are rightly scheduled. The field service scheduling app ensures that the visiting technician can troubleshoot the client’s problem in the first visit itself. This improves client experience and gratifies them in the long run. Besides assigning the job to the nearest available technician, the software also ensures a quick turnaround time which further improves their client’s experience.
In short, the software allows the field workforce to deliver more value through optimized job scheduling
Conclusion
Using an online field scheduling software empowers the entire team, including the service manager and the technicians, to work coherently where location boundaries do not limit them. They achieve the much-required mobility in their work styles and workflows. They can connect as a distributed team and yet continue working as a cohesive team. Everyone has visibility of what others are doing and everyone is well connected to communicate without any gap. For any business that is yet to experience the benefits of field service of scheduling software, it is high time to integrate such software in their operations and optimize their processes for improved productivity and efficiency.
