The key determinant of a successful business is its satisfied customers. When you succeed to satisfy your customers to such a degree that they start coming back to you, start preferring you over others, and start recommending you to friends and family, then you can affirm that yours is a successful business.
Need not say that the success will get instantly followed by profit. Thus, the purpose of a business is not to earn profit but to earn satisfied customers.
Many factors lead to customer satisfaction, such as location proximity, pricing, service/ product quality, customer experience, etc. But when it comes to field services, the factor of location proximity gets replaced by how faster the service provider can reach the customer location and how effectively render the services.
The operational efficiency of your team throughout the service cycle plays a major role in achieving the required promptness and effectiveness.
Can field service management software help in improving the operational efficiency of your team? Can it make your team collaborate and work together in a better way to overcome the challenge of delayed service? Can it empower and equip your team to deliver a better customer experience? The answer to all is 'Yes.'
Let's see how management software does all of that:
Quick Arriving: A customer who has asked for any sort of field service doesn't want to be kept waiting. Psychologically, the customer won't mind if the servicing time gets a bit long, but if the field agents get late in arriving at the customer location, then that's a turndown.
Field sales management software can facilitate the early arrival of field agents through effective job scheduling and route mapping. The automation enabled features of the software, to categorize the service calls and assign the job to the nearest available field agent.
Having the job destination in proximity ensures the timely arrival of the field agent. This can be further accentuated with the help of route mapping that shares the shortest and safest route with the field agent and thus, he can reach the destination on time by overcoming time delays because of long routes and traffic jams.
Faster Services: Once the field agent is at the client's location, the customer expects faster services. To accomplish this, the field agents need to have certain details at their fingertips, and the management software can provide exactly that.
The complete customer details, service history, customer agreement, price quotation details, and all other information can be made available to the field agent on a real-time basis. Thus, no time gets wasted in making phone calls to the back office. In a way, the software makes the field service man completely equipped with all the necessary information required for prompt execution of services.
In fact, the software is also useful in equipping the field agent with the right tools and parts. Before leaving for the customer's location, the field agents can be provided with the complete list of tools and parts that they will require to execute their jobs. And the list can be extracted on a complete automation basis.
Customer Engagement: Customer engagement also leads to customer satisfaction as that way they stay more connected to your brand. Although management software is not an exclusive customer engagement tool, some of its key features lead to a good degree of customer engagement.
For instance, the route map of the field agent can be shared with the customers as well, so they can track the location/movement of the agent. Then, customers can be provided with automated workflow updates which keep them notified about the advances in their service requests. Also, reminders of upcoming service requirements can be sent to them.
Customer Convenience: Timely arrival at the customer location and faster services do build a good customer experience, but the experience also gets determined by the degree of convenience offered during the complete service cycle.
Live tracking the arrival of the field agent, on-site payment settlement and invoice generation, easy feedback process, trusted advice to avoid upcoming issues, etc. make a client feel more comfortable with your services.
Final Thoughts
It is hard for a business to survive without the aid of technology, and automation is one necessity that shouldn't be overruled by businesses. Management software is an all-in-one tool to harness the power of automation in your business operations and gain more efficiency in the overall service process.
Starting from job scheduling, monitoring, employee performance analysis, data sharing, and managing, payment, and invoice, every aspect of a service cycle can be effectively managed using management software.
