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As we continue to bring you extracts from The Service Manager Handbook, published by Advanced Field Service here we look at three quick tips to help you manage your service P&L whilst keeping your field workers happy and motivated…

Download the full 40 page ebook for free by simply clicking here and completing the brief registration form

 

Mine your data to plan for the future

Today’s customers are flexing their buying muscles and exerting pressure on suppliers to fulfil ever more challenging SLAs. To stand a chance of meeting rising customer expectations, while maintaining profit levels, you need full visibility over your contracts and tighter control over your SLA management.

Setting realistic budgets and timescales

Having access to historical information on the actual cost of similar projects, contracts and large installations helps to ensure that future bid costs and resource requirements are accurately assessed and a realistic price proposed.

You want to win the contract but not at a cost that could break you!

There are many factors that will determine the price of the project to the client, but the cost and resources that are needed to deliver the contract are not always fully considered at the bid stage. Without formal systems in place, many service organisations find it difficult and time-consuming to compile this historical information.

 

As a result, bids are based on gut feel and best guess, running the risk of perpetuating profit-killing mistakes. With an accurate budget in place – covering all your materials, labour and subcontractor costs – managers will be able to track actuals against estimates and use this information for future planning.

Optimising parts management - Don’t tie up your cash 

If your organisation stores parts, you will be all too aware of the dangers of stockpiling when cash flow is so important. Rather than relying on best guess, automating the forecasting process to predict usage will avoid the pitfall of holding more parts than are required.

Your systems should give you the power to analyse your parts history, so you can recognise trends and fluctuations to ensure that levels fall within the desired optimum range and can anticipate demand at peak times. This will reduce the amount of cash held in unnecessary high numbers of parts, and reduce the overheads of managing your inventory, while ensuring that your engineers achieve maximum productivity by having the right parts at the right time.

Managing parts ‘on-the-move’

Your systems should also enable you to keep track of your van stock levels and usage, as well as automatically re-ordering and replenishing when nearing a minimum level.

A good service management solution can help to effectively manage your inventory of parts, enabling you to carry the right levels to meet customer demand, without restricting cash flow. Good planning will also help avoid overstocks by scheduling parts to arrive when you need them, and ensuring you are able to optimise fluctuations in demand and effectively manage

Monitoring and managing performance

KPIs are a vital tool for service organisations to effectively track, monitor and evaluate performance to achieve sustainable growth. It is vital to identify which KPIs align to your business success. Standard service management metrics include: [unordered_list style="bullet"]

• First-time fix rates
• SLA adherence
• Engineer productivity
• Job costing
• Call rates
• Net profit margin
• Stock value
• Customer satisfaction/retention

Without proactively monitoring KPIs, service businesses are vulnerable to problems that can seriously undermine both performance and profitability. For example, failure to regularly monitor sales margins could mean that a costly recurring mistake is discovered only at year-end.

Sharing achievements

All too often, key performance information is only available to managers and directors, with staff review periods that are too infrequent to proactively affect the outcome of future jobs.

 

Also, this information may only be available through a central source, which can lead to a feeling of ‘them and us’. Relevant information should be available to all members of the team. Simple, clear and targeted information – not complicated reports – will help them to take ownership of their utilisation, performance and deliverables.

Using systems that can provide this vital information in real-time, such as mobile or web-based reporting, allows field engineers to see if they are on track to deliver within the schedule allocated. If not, the issue can be raised at the earliest opportunity, the causes assessed and appropriate action taken.

Download the full 40 page ebook for free by simply clicking here and completing the brief registration form

 

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The field service industry never stands still: new technology, new market conditions, new entrants, new customer requirements…they all make it essential to keep a watching brief on the changing business and technology landscape...

To help field service professionals keep up to date with these ever shifting sands Advanced Field Service have produced their Service Manager Handbook, and Field Service News will be bringing you a selection of features from this excellent resource for Service Managers working in all verticals, for companies big and small, across the next few months.

You can also download the complete edition of The Service Manager Handbook by clicking here and completing the brief registration form.

It’s an interesting time to be in field service. We are on the cusp of exciting new technology becoming an integral part of the way business is conducted.

At the same time, field service companies still face pressures to achieve more, at less cost, on a day-to-day basis. Advanced Field Service believe that when we reflect on 2015/2016, we will see that it is a time of consolidation, in which managers concentrate on improving efficiency and productivity levels using their existing processes and optimising their existing technology, rather than rushing to adopt leading-edge solutions. In the second edition of the Service Manager Handbook from Advanced Field Service, is therefore focused on optimising your processes and making your systems work harder for your business.

 

It shows how gaining insight into every corner of your business equips you to identify and understand those areas that are under-performing and to uncover and model best practice within your organisation.

Having the power to access critical data across all areas of your service business, make informed instant decisions and manage your operation – from the time the customer logs a call to a satisfactory conclusion – will keep you at the front of a highly competitive field. In this the first part of this new series we take a look at the most important part of any service business… the customer. We’ve all heard the old adage that the customer is always right, but that only holds true if they are the right customer. 

Modelling your ideal customers

In an effort to maintain business viability – and keep your engineers working out in the field – it can be tempting to take on low-margin clients. If business is thin on the ground, this is understandable. However, to build a sustainable business, you need to focus your resources on the jobs, contracts and clients that have most potential for profit, rather than trying to be all things to all clients.

Furthermore, all the following whittle away at your profit margins, and you can probably think of other time and resource wasters:

• Scope creep, where the job is bigger than first appeared
• Doing favours for clients (“While you’re here, can you just look at this…”)
• Providing free credit to late payers who go beyond your payment terms
• Providing an ‘archiving’ service, whereby customers call you to find out when a service or repair was last done[unordered_list] 

It’s worth stepping back and analysing your client base to identify: Clients who are already profitable: 

• How can you quantify for them the work that you do, so that it is recognised and suitably remunerated?
• How can you keep these clients ‘locked in’ by delivering service beyond the agreed service level agreement (SLA) but without draining your resources and revenues?

Clients who could become more profitable:

• How could you better manage the time you spend on their projects?
• Can you identify where you are providing more than you agreed within the contract and budget?
• Do you have an evidence base that will support you in negotiating with clients to pay more or expect less?
• Can you let them self-serve on their documentation through a customer portal to reduce calls on administration matters?

Clients who are unlikely to ever become sustainably profitable: 

• How could you readdress the balance and bring these clients back within acceptable parameters?
• If the evidence shows these clients are always going to be an excessive drain on resources, do you need to make the difficult decision to agree to go your separate ways in order to free up your engineers’ valuable time for more profitable jobs?

 

By gaining a better understanding of every client’s worth to the business, you’ll be well placed to decide where to invest your resources for optimum return, both in retaining clients and pursuing new business.  

Want to know more? To download the full 40 page eBook edition of The Service Managers Handbook 2015 instantly click here and completing the brief registration form.

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It’s a given that the customer is your number one priority, however, to satisfy and retain your clients, field service companies need to repeatedly provide a professional service. Here we take another look at a section from the Service Management Handbook published by advanced field service to see how. 

You can also download a copy of the full 45 page Service Management Handbook by clicking this link

Typically, customer service is impacted by a combination of factors that result in the customer not getting what they want, when they want it.

Organisations generally fail to deliver successful customer service if they are impacted by the following:

• Lack of integrated, real-time communication between the field engineer and the customer service representative
• Poor visibility of current stock levels across multiple systems and manual entry
• Manual processes hindered by unnecessary paperwork

This can, in turn, cause problems with accuracy and delays, or just a simple lack of flexibility, when it comes to dealing with customer issues, for example:

• Not able to notify customers if the engineer or part delivery is delayed
• Not able to order and replace spare parts quickly, particularly if an incorrect part is ordered initially
• Inefficient use of engineers’ time and resources
• Not able to respond quickly and flexibly to customer requests

Delivering a winning customer service is what sets field service businesses apart.

6 steps to service success

Given these common challenges, what can service businesses do to really ensure that what you are delivering is adding genuine value to your clients? And what can you do to ensure your value-add is fully recognised by the client?

Here’s our winning formula…

1. Provide a professional response

Whether you operate in the B2B or consumer/domestic markets, you’ll need to consistently meet basic criteria, such as responding within a set timeframe or appointment window.

A field service solution helps you to deploy your engineers with maximum efficiency and equip them with everything they need to know to do a proficient job, from the customer’s contact details to inspection sheets.

Technology gives you the option to send the engineer’s estimated time of arrival, by SMS or email, to the customer. If the engineer is running late, you can keep the customer posted on developments. In many cases, customers will find a delay more acceptable if they are informed of the reasons for any hold-up, along with the new ETA.

2. Live capture of onsite data

The information your engineers enter remotely through their PDAs should automatically feedback to your call control centre and back-office reporting and billing systems.

Customers can be sent up-to-date compliance certification within minutes after the job is completed. Sending an invoice promptly while the job is still fresh in the customer’s mind will also avoid queries and delays further down the line.

While not strictly speaking a customer service issue, having fast efficient billing processes reinforces your image as a professional service provider and helps speed up payments and improve cash flow.

3. Collect customer feedback

Rating product suppliers and service providers has become a way of life.

Customers are accustomed to completing online surveys and logging their opinions on review sites.

Without bombarding customers with survey requests, you can collect their feedback using standard forms on the engineer’s PDA or schedule a survey to be emailed to them after the job is complete.

Not only does this foster confidence that their views are valued, you can angle the questions to gain valuable insight into your customers’ thinking and identify possible opportunities to upsell the contract and services, where appropriate.

4. Sophisticated customer intelligence

Intelligence on your clients will enable you to offer a greater level of customer service and provide your teams with organisational knowledge, information and the expertise to make complementary sales.

The provision of powerful, accurate information equips your teams to better meet the needs of your clients. A CRM solution, integrated with your service management software, will share information across your whole business, helping to facilitate access to critical information at all times whilst managing your sales pipeline and opportunities.

5. Deliver on time

Accurate and consistent service delivery is essential to keep the business running to its optimum. Capturing data on the spot and time-stamping photos will protect you from becoming open to penalties and demands for refunds. Always putting the customer first and meeting their demands and expectations will put you ahead of the competition.

6. Customer web-portals

Many service organisations now approach many of their major clients as strategic partners, rather than just mere end-users, working in collaboration to ensure long-standing relationships and increased profitability.

A customer web-portal offers your clients, staff and contractors, the ability to create jobs, view history, access contract agreements and run interactive reports on their KPIs. This type of self-service access will ensure your clients are kept firmly in the loop, cementing your status as a preferred service partner – without adding to the workload of your service administrators.

Want to know more? You can download a copy of the full 45 page Service Management Handbook by clicking this link

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