82% of service decision makers say their company’s customer service must transform in order to stay competitive.

Customer demand for fast, personalized, and connected engagement anytime, anywhere, has compelled service leaders to take notice. Effective service can enhance customer experiences, differentiate brands, and drive new revenue streams. As a result, service leaders are investing in their people, processes, and technology to drive digital transformation.

The next step is to connect your field service management solution to your customer relationship management platform to get a complete view of your customer. You can then evaluate its success by tracking these important metrics and taking steps to improve overall performance.

Call Volume

Customers want personalized service that’s easy and fast. If your employees are taking a large number of calls with scheduling requests and status updates, you need to make the following changes:

• Deliver Self-Service – Enable self-service through your website or mobile app where customers can raise requests and access all the information they need.
• Automate Notifications – Keep your customers informed with timely, automatic alerts or notifications providing status updates or communicating any changes in the schedule.
• Provide Real-Time Information – Provide visibility to your customers into the location of your field service personnel along with the ETA.

Time Management

Service delays have a negative impact on customer experience and waste their valuable time. Accurate ETAs can solve this problem to a great extent. You can ensure that field service workers are on time by implementing the following:

• Optimize Route Planning – Improve the productivity of your field service crew by finding the best routes, avoiding road closures and traffic jams.
• Optimize Job Scheduling – Eliminate human error and ensure faster service by using field service management systems to assign the right people to each job based on location, availability, and skill sets.
• Monitor Service Crew – Use embedded GPS sensors to track and monitor field service crew, giving managers a complete view of their workers in real-time

Number of Jobs Per Day

Field service management solutions provide deep visibility, allowing managers to optimize job scheduling and take on more jobs. In order to ensure an increase in the number of jobs per day, you must use analytics to assign jobs based on different criteria including worker location, skill set, worker availability, equipment availability etc. Field service management solutions also allow you to schedule and reassign tasks on the fly if there are any delays or scheduling changes.

First-Visit Resolution

Ensure that your field service workers have the right capabilities to increase first-visit resolution:

• Provide real-time information – Ensure that your field workers have 24×7 access to all the information they need even when they are offline, as jobs often happen in remote areas with unreliable internet connectivity. This includes visibility into customer data, task details, asset history, IoT device data, and scheduling information to improve the chances of a quick resolution.
• Provide ongoing support – Ensure that your field workers have 24×7 access to helpful resources such as knowledge articles and video tutorials. Provide remote assistance via email, phone or chat to walk through the right solution.

Customer Satisfaction

Collect data on customer satisfaction by allowing customers to provide continuous feedback. This can be done through your website, app, email, or SMS. You can use surveys, questionnaires, or direct outreach to collect feedback on everything from appointment booking to their experience with a field service worker.

Employee Turnover

The employee turnover is high in field service workers who are not paid on time due to inefficient, manual time-tracking and approval processes. Field service management software has inbuilt time tracking capabilities that can simplify your timesheets and automate the payroll process. Field service workers can clock in and out from their mobile devices, expediting their payments.

Costs

Field service management solutions drive efficiencies and improve productivity in the field. In order to maximize their benefits and ultimately lower costs, take these steps:

• Accelerate Invoice Processing – Eliminate error-prone, paper-based invoicing by delivering mobile and self-service capabilities. Job completion can be confirmed via mobile devices and customers can be billed faster.
• Automate Processes – Use automation to create intelligent workflows, helping you assign the right workers to the right jobs and optimizing scheduling to eliminate potential overtime costs.

Sales Opportunities

Field service workers can generate sales opportunities by guiding customers through their options in case of a repair or replacement. Ensure that field workers are well-equipped to capitalize on sales opportunities and set up a process for notifying sales reps about these opportunities via the CRM solution. The sales reps can then follow up with the prospects for a personalized sales experience.