6 common problems of Field Service Management

Just like customers expect from the company for the products and the price they pay, the company relies on its employees to meet these expectations. This raises a concern that field workers who are away from the premises, are in reality maintaining their schedules. It’s definitely helpful to know about field service staff’s real-time location, their performance as per their skills & utilisation of duty hours. Tracking your field workforce whilst they are in the field, assists in allocating them work-orders, manage the task distribution & handle more requests from the customers in a day.

Budget directives hunt every field service manager to make a profit for the organisation while maintaining equilibrium between quality of service for customers and number of workers. For the large businesses, although, they have high strength of employees, it should be noted that underused resources can decrease the profit and savings. SMBs have to keep a strict watch on extracting maximum performance from their limited number of field employees & retain their customers.

As per a research, that was done by The Service Council:

While providing a customer with better services, increasing the company’s reputation & making most of the available resources, there arises a question for the safety of workers going out to hazardous locations. It is one of the primary issues for many businesses to be in constant touch or have a way to connect to their workers to handle emergencies. Field service is a segment where many jobs involve a degree of risk to complete it. So, it becomes much necessary & organisation’s responsibility to trace & interact with their worker when they are doing such jobs.

Customer relationship management practices adopted by any organisation have a huge impact to sustain their business. Retaining existing customers and gaining new ones requires attending each of them with equal consideration. But, what if your executives spend their time only in answering same questions again and again? And if a customer is not answered, negative feedback on social media can prove to be a big setback. The confusion here is – whether to allow your team to attend only customer calls or ask them to focus more on work productivity?

Every company needs precise and clear figures to analyse and compare their goals to the real outcome. One cannot blindly continue their practices and suffer later. It is always prudent to take future decisions based on the statistics & current scenario. But, do manual methods provide accurate analytics? There has to be a provision to see the present situation and foresee what can be the future if we continue the same techniques to define the ultimate success. Emphasis should be to achieve workforce productivity, enhance customer experience with KPI & assist decision-makers.

The crucial yet indecisive factor is to know the exact way to define the standard of service delivery optimisation & meet customer expectations. Industries usually consider options like increasing workforce, increasing budget, employing more centres, attracting customers across mediums & much more. But, there’s no point in gaining the customers and losing them by being lesser than your competitors. It will no longer help to have more people working without streamlined processes where few are over-occupied & some have no clue about what to do. Over few years, software for field service management has proven its benefits to balance all these needs.