Marne Martin, CEO of ServicePower, discusses how the “intelligent” service organisation is able to meet increasing customer expectations whilst simultaneously driving increases in revenue and brand loyalty...

Productivity, for field service operations, is the means to an end of delighting both your customer and the C suite in your company.

Improved customer satisfaction and increased revenue are the holy grail of any field service department. If you are also able to do these two things using a hybrid workforce, your internal metrics and profitability of your service organisation can also improve.

Large enterprise organisations have long understood the value of artificial intelligence algorithms embedded within mobile workforce management technology, in its ability to improve productivity and efficiency of staffed mobile workers, as well as its ability to provide field teams with the process and information needed while on site to resolve issues in a single visit.

In the last decade, more and more of these same organisations have taken hold of the additional benefits of intelligently integrating contracted mobile workers into the labour mix, as well as the ability for customers to schedule into the time slots that a service organisation or manufacturer want to make available.

Using contractors expands capacity, in terms of availability, skills or geographical coverage, field service organisations can provide service when and where their customers require, in a manner that’s more consistent with an employee with a branded van.

In an “intelligent” service organisation, service is enabled to meet the customer’s expectations, drive increases in revenue, brand loyalty, as well as efficient capacity planning.

By using the available technology, plus a hybrid workforce model that looks to coverage and demand to assess what technicians you need where, the type, skills and training such that you can begin blending employed with contracted workforces, the next level of productivity beyond that of your peers can be achieved.

Field Service experts know service. But what can expertise in field service bring to complimentary sectors that are used only to point to point travel optimisation and not schedule or priority based optimisation.

The fact of the matter is that any business with mobile workers whether service, sales, delivery, inspection, home health care, etc. are dearly in need of the ability to drive improved schedule prioritisation, compliance and productivity.

With that goal in mind, ServicePower recently released Boost, on the Salesforce AppExchange.

Boost provides any organisation with mobile workers beyond field service, to healthcare, financial services and sales teams, the ability to continue using their Salesforce application to manage customers and create work orders for when field based services, of any type, are needed. Then, using Boost, pass that list of work orders or tasks to ServicePower which uses our patented Artificial intelligence-based optimisation technology to produce a more productive, least costly schedule.

Boost makes schedule optimisation go far beyond only travel optimisation as it does both to achieve greater improvements in productivity, capacity and schedule compliance available to every organisation, easily, from the Salesforce AppExchange.

Start moving beyond just the CRM to after-sales service to prioritise your visits by propensity to buy, profitability on orders, or any other customer metric you feel important.

It’s also worthy to note that true optimisation is not geo-productivity or Uber-like logic. Products that claim geo-productivity or Uber capabilities do provide a mechanism to schedule a resource when a customer raises a hand for a service. So, is response time better in this scenario?

Yes, in so much as you have a worker in the field already sitting idle, you can see their proximity on a map, and send them to the new customer. It doesn’t limit the schedule costs, because it’s not taking into account the entire daily schedule. It’s reactive scheduling, which is nice if you have slack  capacity, but slack capacity costs money.

On demand scheduling is great, from a PR perspective. It doesn’t offer the proactive services customers expect from providers today.

Mobile workforce management software with optimisation does.

Boost, in particular, provides more than a point on a map. It provides an easy route to a real optimised schedule, using your existing Salesforce implementation, regardless of whether you’re managing 25 mobile workers or 1,000.

Find Boost on the Salesforce AppExchange at: http://sforce.co/2p4mKV2

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