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How to Increase Your Field Service Efficiencies?
We all know delivery of good field service is critical to enhancing client loyalty and trustworthiness. In fact, an insightful survey revealed 3 out of 4 corporate decision-makers believe field service is a major driver of their revenues, while 4 out of 5 leaders of companies opined field service is a vital component of their overall business strategies.
Today, we’ll examine how organizations can deliver customer-centered field service and maximize the productivity of their mobile service personnel. But first, let us look at the common challenges faced by firms in delivering field service of high efficacy.
Key Challenges in the Delivery of Effective Field Service
Delivery of hassle-free, consistently-high-quality, efficient field service can be tough; various aspects have a profound negative impact on client experience, and these include the following.
Lengthy waiting time
Ineffective communication with clients
Poor briefing of mobile service reps
These factors can lead to frustrated clients and may also result in expensive return visits, causing stress to your field personnel and leaving them unsatisfied.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically transformed the way companies manage their field service teams. Many organizations began implementing more stringent safety standards and embracing innovative technology-powered solutions such as video-based methods to remotely support their mobile service reps. While the use of digital technologies are indeed a welcome development, most customers preferred in-person onsite visits even during the peak of the pandemic.
So, how can you facilitate high levels of productivity and delight your clientele, while ensuring a safe, service-rep-friendly work environment? You need to follow the best practices listed below.
Best Practices to Maximize Your Field Service Efficiency
Facilitate Consolidation of Data
Providing the right information to your mobile service personnel at the right time plays a key role in enhancing their productivity in a big way. 79% of field service reps believe that they can’t deliver customer service of good quality without the following.
Full context of the client issue
Details of the client
Detailed information about the job
Comprehensive history of the asset
Information about warranties
Ensuring seamless access to this data in a timely manner prevents clients from the hassle of repeating themselves and enables field service teams to use their time optimally.
To equip mobile teams with this information, companies require a robust tool that connects the contact center, dispatchers, field service technicians and even sales reps. For example, Salesforce Field Service can be used to leverage cutting-edge mobile service capabilities and integrate them effortlessly with databases storing client information.
Using a powerful tool such as Salesforce, you can facilitate fully-connected interactions of consistently high quality with clients to create the best value.
Provide Complete Visibility to the Manager of Mobile Service Reps
A major challenge encountered in managing field service activities is keeping track of dispersed personnel. Poor visibility and control can result in low productivity levels and leave field service managers frustrated. Managers of service technicians require the big picture of all schedules, work-jobs and pieces of equipment.
You can provide managers a comprehensive view of all client data, schedules and equipment by using a fully-integrated service management platform such as Salesforce Field Service - the platform will enable them to optimize assignment of resources, pinpoint performance problems and boost productivity significantly.
Facilitate Effective Communication in Real Time
Field service managers need to schedule client visits keeping the customer’s convenience in mind. Clients are bound to be frustrated when they stay at home for a technician’s visit but the field service rep doesn’t turn up. So, it’s very important to inform them about the inability of the technician to visit their place in a timely manner.
Using appointment management tools and with the acceptance from mobile personnel, firms can keep track of their locations to deliver real-time updates to clients. This will go a long way in preventing client frustration.
Harness the Immense Power of Automation
It’s well-known several aspects of mobile personnel management take a lot of time and simple errors can lead to efficiency problems that can prove expensive to fix.
You can automate the execution of major field service tasks to increase productivity of your technicians significantly. For instance, automation of route management activities allows you to cut travel time by charting optimal routes and leveraging real-time traffic data. Likewise, automatic scheduling can minimize the number of mistakes and enable your personnel to focus more on customer-oriented activities.
It’s also a good idea to enable clients to avail self-service or remote video-based assistance, if they want. For example, customers can schedule phone and/or video enabled appointments themselves, using a self-service portal.
As you can see, by following the best practices listed above, you can enhance the efficiency of your field service teams in a big way. At Solunus, we work with you to unleash the power of novel Salesforce solutions to maximize the productivity of your technicians and provide delightful experiences to clients. Our rich experience gained serving companies of all sizes coupled with a proven ‘needs-first’ approach enables us to deliver the perfect solution that provides the best ROI.
Hope you liked this post. How do you ensure high levels of efficiency of your field service teams? We’d love to know.
About Solunus
Solunus is a leading Salesforce consulting company, based in Dallas, TX, USA. Our proven ‘needs-first’ approach coupled with our unrivaled expertise of the Salesforce platform enables us to provide the perfect solution to help you deliver delightful services to customers and achieve rapid growth.