ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘contractors’ CATEGORY

Michael Blumberg, President of Blumberg Advisory Group and founder of fieldserviceinsights.com discusses some of the most crucial mistakes field service companies can make when utilising contingent or seasonal labour...

Field Service Organizations (FSOs) in North America, UK, and Europe are increasingly turning toward crowdsourcing platforms and subcontractors to augment their field workforce.

This type of outsourcing strategy enables FSOs to become more agile in meeting customer demands for service. As a result, they [FSOs] are able to reduce costs and improve service productivity. In addition, crowdsourcing and contingent labour helps solve the problem of finding skilled labour on a rapid basis.

Turning to subcontractors and crowdsourcing platforms does involve relinquishing some level of control over the labour force.However, turning to subcontractors and crowdsourcing platforms does involve relinquishing some level of control over the labour force. Naturally, questions emerge about the reliability, expertise, and quality of technicians that are sourced through these options.

Over the last two years, we have spoken with dozens of companies who have or currently utilize contingent labour to either augment their existing workforce or gain greater agility and efficiency over the entire field service delivery process. The majority are satisfied with their external providers and report positive results on key performance metrics such as First Time Fix and SLA Compliance/Onsite Arrive Time.   On the other hand, a few anomalies exist where the performance of contingent labour did not meet the FSOs expectations.

Quite often, FSOs who experience subpar performance make critical mistakes when retaining and managing contingent labour.

Here is our perspective on the biggest mistakes they need to avoid:

1. Failure to fully vet individual technicians doing the work

Don’t assume that every contract technician (e.g., subcontractor, freelance, crowdsource) you dispatch has the skills, training, and experience necessary to complete the work properly and in a timely manner. Insist on viewing background checks, certifications, and credentials of every contract technician assigned to your company.

2. Failure to train and onboard technicians

Quite often companies issue work orders without to contract technicians without training or guiding them on how they'd like the work to be performed.

For example, they do not explain how they'd like the tech to greet the customer and/or notify the customer when the work is complete.  Fortunately, Internet-based learning systems make it possible for companies to train and onboard contractors in a cost-effective and rapid manner.

3. Failure to communicate with contractors

This is the biggest mistake that a company can make is hand off work orders as if they were tossing a hot potato over a fence.

This will result in problem with respect to key service performance metrics such as SLA compliance, First Time Fix, and No Fault Found.  It is important that companies provide contractors with detailed and specific instructions about the activities they need to perform on each assignment.

At the same time, contractors also need to communicate with the companies that hire them on the status of calls, issues or problems they are experiencing, and results of their actions.

4. Failure to integrate contract or crowdsourced technicians into their service delivery process

Problems can occur when there is too much of an arm’s less relationship between the company and the contractor.  In other words, there is little accountability, visibility, and control between the company and contractors/technicians, and vice versa.

The key to success lies in treating contractors as an extension of your company.  Companies can achieve this outcome by leveraging communication technology, collaboration tools, and workforce automation software.  Relying on these systems will ensure the company achieves best in class service performance through its contractor network.

In summary, FSOs experience challenges to crowdsourcing when they underestimate the level of due diligence, systems, and processes they need to put in place when utilizing this type of labour. This does not necessarily mean that they must make huge capital investments.

FSOs experience challenges to crowdsourcing when they underestimate the level of due diligence, systems, and processes they need to put in place when utilizing this type of labourRather, they are urged to design and implement processes and procedures by leveraging existing infrastructure when they can.

Devoting the time and effort to this initiative will pay off. Our research suggests that FSOs who have an unpleasant experience with contingent labour do so because they rush into the decision without much thought, planning, and preparation.

Basically, they are looking to solve an immediate problem with no consideration to future. In other words, they are taking a tactical approach to labour shortages where a strategic solution is required.

Be social and share

Marne Martin, CEO ServicePower explains the benefits of an integrated dedicated and freelance workforce and why scheduling them shouldn’t be a chore...

Service is going through an exciting change as businesses are finding more productive ways to satisfy the needs of their customers, while also improving their bottom line. We aren’t talking about “just” overflow or managing seasonality, we are talking about executing on a strategy that can fundamentally change how and the speed at which you provide service to your customers. As business moves forward, more and more companies have come to realise the benefits of a labour model that can really harness both productivity and customer experience advances.

In the past, technology, work flows and field service management techniques weren’t particularly reliable at managing a labour model that wasn’t either a dedicated workforce or a freelance workforce. But times are changing.

 

The capabilities of software that can handle the complexities of using both a dedicated and extended workforce are here. Having done this now effectively for more than a decade for many of the best known enterprises, here is our advice on such “hybrid” labor models, ensuring the highest productivity and customer satisfaction levels.

Let’s consider the reasons many organisations deploy a labour model utilising both a dedicated and extended workforce.

Availability

Customers want service now. An extended workforce enables expectations to be met when demand is high, and also buffers cost when demand is low. Using a mix of labour resources with appropriate credentialing and training expands your capabilities at a lower cost while also getting service to your customers sooner.

Cycle time management

Using cycle time calculations from business intelligence applications, businesses may distribute work to the mobile resources with the lowest cost or most desired cycle time metrics, both of which may fluctuate between employed and contracted resources, given current conditions, to meet customer demand. Cost can also be factored into this understanding that time is money.

Quality control

Organisations which deliver field based services may manage job distribution based upon quality of service metrics. Maximise your customer experience by ranking well liked technicians higher so that if they have capacity, they get the job.

Seasonality

Being able to simultaneously search and book employed or contracted mobile workers enables you to manage your workforce consistently, while also meeting KPIs during demand fluctuation.

Catastrophic events

Catastrophes are happening at a higher rate than ever before. It’s critical in those catastrophic situations for feet to hit the ground immediately to provide care and services, for instance to insurance policy holders. If you are a business that handles catastrophes, if you don’t have an extended workforce and also one that is tied into your core technology solutions, you should.

Extraordinary territories

The cost of expanding the reach of service where there isn’t significant and steady job density is high. To decrease costs and improve productivity,it’s best to schedule and route mobile workers to jobs in the closest proximity to each other, to the mobile worker’s start and stop locations, and within the areas they know best. If jobs are infrequent, the cost of credentialing and training a freelancer may well be more efficient.

Infrequent or out of the ordinary jobs

The same can be said for ‘out of the ordinary’ jobs. Consider smart home system installation or customer product education visits commonly associated with outcome based services. Both type of job requires special skills. Do you employ uniquely skilled individuals and wait for work to come in, or contract a scalable workforce able to provide these services as needed? Clearly the latter is the best choice for many businesses.

Cost control

Similar to quality or cycle time control, using business intel to derive job cost by labour channel enables organisations to evaluate the least costly mobile worker for a job, depending on skills, travel, and salary for instance. The least costly resource may be a contractor rather than an employee.

We suspect one or more of these scenarios apply to your business.

Intelligent, integrated dispatching

Mobile workforce management software traditionally, especially within the field service industry, meant scheduling. There are several flavours of scheduling, however folding contractors into the mix requires more than attempting to plug them into those existing scheduling solutions.

Utilising an aggregated dispatching software platform provides those same jobs sources with the ability to send their work alongside other aggregated work, improving operational efficiencies and reducing costs, for every member of the service delivery chain.

Adding an integrated platform with a robust, intelligent and real time scheduling algorithm to intelligently and quickly determine the best routing scenarios, while also having the ability to ‘reoptimise’ the schedule, moving the jobs in time as well as between employees and contractors based on real time conditions, is a major plus.

ServicePower has been instrumental in the deployment of integrated, mixed labour strategies since 2004 including the configurable options through our broker product to fully automate the intelligent and dynamic scheduling of either employees or contractors through a robust, fully configurable rules engine, enabling our clients to seamlessly provide the best, fastest and least costly services within their industries.

 

ServicePower Unity takes that one step farther by providing our entire mobile workforce management platform via a SaaS deployment, for one low cost. We’ve taken the ability to dispatch any field resource and made it simple to deploy and easy to pay for whether your labour force are dedicated or freelancers

Scheduling mobile workers to meet customer demand is far less complex when you have a partner that understands the needs of your business and technology that supports an integrated dedicated and extended workforce.

ServicePower processes more than three million job interactions a day with proven ability to drive customer experience whether your technicians are your employees or freelancers. Let us help you to make it easier for your teams to evolve your workforce strategy and customer experience.

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

ClickSoftware Technologies Ltd. have recently announced Service Networks for Contractors, a new mobile field service management solution that synchronises the scheduling, dispatch, and work completion between businesses and their contractors.

Enterprises can now optimally manage their network of contractors to adhere to service level agreements and have better visibility and control of the service delivery process. Simultaneously contractors maintain their autonomy in running their own businesses. Customers, of course, benefit from harmonious service delivery with minimal discontinuities or surprises.

Using the solution, contractors are better equipped to efficiently plan and execute the delivery of service, enabling them to book and complete more jobs overall. The streamlined operations will enable contractors to collect payment faster, thanks to the ability to provide proof of service in real-time, at the time of job completion. The new solution ultimately shortens invoicing and payment cycles to increase reimbursement rates and help drive revenues.

Consumers reap immediate benefits, including access to timely and accurate information, including contractor location, estimated arrival time and job status. By creating a fully transparent process, regardless of whether the service is performed by internal employees or third party technicians, the friction is removed, and the consumer experience improves.

 

"The field service industry continues to evolve to incorporate more automated scheduling tools, and is quickly advancing to real-time workflow mobile technologies that provide businesses with new capabilities and information to effectively help manage third-party contractors," said Aly Pinder Jr., Senior Research Analyst Aberdeen Group. "These technologies have the potential to enable both enterprise service providers and contractors to more quickly and accurately perform their jobs, while providing consistent customer experience."

"In today's service industry it is very common to see service providers of all sizes operating in a wide variety of outsourcing and contracting models. The Service Networks for Contractors is a milestone in the path to a comprehensive Service network vision where communities of contractors will interact in harmony with each other to deliver outstanding service together with business efficiencies," said Dr. Moshe BenBassat, Founder and CEO of ClickSoftware. "This new network leverages the 2014 acquisition of Xora, seamlessly extending enterprise-grade solutions to workforces of all sizes."

 

---

 

Be social and share this story