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With 2020 on the horizon, it’s the perfect time to think about new ways to improve your field service business. Paul Whitelam, ClickSoftware outlines nine key areas that you need to be targeting to ensure your service delivery remains competitive as we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century...

You’ve probably been hearing a lot about new trends and visions for the future, and it’s probably a little overwhelming. An easy way to get started is by throwing away some of the outdated practices you’ve been following. To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of field service practices you might want to leave behind in 2019.

Manual scheduling

Field service scheduling requires making several quick and calculated decisions. You need to consider everything from travel time and routing, technicians’ schedules and skill sets, equipment tracking, and SLA compliance. It’s much easier to rely on an automated scheduling solution to make optimized decisions for you, so you can focus on the bigger stuff—like your customers’ satisfaction.

Using separate solutions

The only way to gain true visibility into field service schedules is to manage everything in a single solution. This includes schedules, capacity planning, long- and short-cycle work, crew allocations, and more. Limiting field service management to a single solution also gives you the flexibility to manage your workforce more efficiently and ensure that you’re equipped to handle urgent work.

Not prepping technicians for customer service

Your field resources are often the only face-to-face contact your customers have with your company. This means it’s crucial they are equipped to give the best customer service possible. Start thinking of your technicians as your brand ambassadors, and ensure they have the soft skills to make a great impression on your customers.

Lack of visibility into technician location

With Uber you can hail a ride and know exactly where your driver is and when they will arrive. And Amazon provides updates when your package is shipped and as soon as it’s delivered. Your customers know this level of visibility is possible, and they expect it in their service too. Allow customers to track their technician’s location and send them reminders and updates about the status of their service. On top of giving your customers’ peace of mind, this also helps you avoid no shows and last minute cancellations.

Long Appointment Windows & Exact Time Slots

According to our Field Service Report, more than 60% of consumers across all countries said a long wait time between their service appointment being booked and carried out led to a bad customer service experience. It’s no surprise because today’s customers expect service fast, and definitely, don’t want to be waiting around all day to get it. Use optimized scheduling and appointment booking to ensure shorter, two-hour service windows for your customers.

Leaving the customer site before booking a follow-up appointment

Sometimes a repair is more complex than originally thought or a technician doesn’t have the right part to complete a job. When a follow-up appointment is needed, don’t leave the customer site until it is booked. Instead of simply ordering a part and asking the customer to call and schedule when they receive it, do it for them. The customer will feel more at ease knowing that even though the problem wasn’t fixed today, it will be fixed as soon as possible.

Not measuring customer effort score

When it comes to measuring customer experience, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores are usually the go to. But in today’s on-demand world, convenience and ease are becoming more and more important to customers. Many organizations have started measuring customer experience by the amount of effort customers are putting into getting an issue resolved. Add this to your list of KPIs so you can ensure future customer engagements are simple and seamless.

Not using live traffic updates

As customer expectations continue to rise, the importance of route optimization and getting resources from place to place is ever increasing. Many organizations are taking advantage of predictive travel and applications like Google Maps to accurately estimate travel times and plan routes ahead of the service day. However, it’s also important to consider real-time, live traffic updates on the day of service to account for unforeseen traffic and roadblocks.

Leaving out change management

When your service team has been doing things a certain way for several years, bringing in a new solution can be overwhelming. Even if the previous solution was inefficient or completely manual and paper-based, change can be scary. When implementing a new field service management solution, it’s important to get everyone on board and comfortable with the new solution—so don’t skip out on change management. Emphasize the benefits of FSM—such as efficiency, cost savings, and customer satisfaction—and make sure everyone is properly trained on using the solution.

While no one can know exactly what the field service management landscape will look like in 2020, it’s safe to expect increasing customer expectations and new technologies. Start preparing your organization for what’s next today.

 

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FLS, Fast Lean Smart, a leader in field force appointment, schedule and route optimisation solutions, has recently announced the results of its annual customer satisfaction survey in the UK.

Jeremy Squire, FLS UK Managing Director comments “Outstanding customer satisfaction is what our customers strive to achieve from their field service operations and I believe we should be setting the right example”.

FLS customers include leaders in equipment maintenance, utilities/telecoms, healthcare, financial services/insurance claims, facilities management/property maintenance, engineering compliance inspections, retail home deliveries and more. In December 2017, FLS UK surveyed every live customer it supports directly with two key questions.

The first question was very direct “How do you rate the service you receive from FLS support? (1 - 10)”. The result was an average score of 9.3.The first question was very direct “How do you rate the service you receive from FLS support? (1 - 10)”. The result was an average score of 9.3.

The second was a Net Promotor Score (NPS) styled question “How likely is it that you would recommend FLS VISITOUR to a friend who has a similar scheduling requirement? (0 - 10)”

Using the standard formula for detractors (range 0-6), passives (7-8), promoters (9-10), there was no need for a complex calculation because every customer was a promoter for FLS VISITOUR scheduling solution, the NPS score was the maximum 100!

Best in class

Jeremy Squire reflects “I feel very proud of my team for the satisfaction they are delivering and the fact every customer would recommend us is possibly unique in this market. Our strategy will continue to focus on innovation and our customer on-going success using FLS scheduling software, and to build our business through recommendations.”

Jeremy concludes “This proves real-time scheduling and route optimisation solutions really can work well for a wide range of field service businesses, you’ve just got to choose the right technology and partner to work with”.

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