What is Field Service Optimization? How to Optimize Your Field Service Business Process?

As a business owner, there are two main challenges that usually come up in your mind: How to start a new business and how to optimize the business process?

To start a new business, you need to take care of basic points like business planning, service offerings, budget planning, and marketing. But, today, we are going to discuss optimization techniques that will help you to enhance your business performance. 

You’ve probably heard before how a field service organization wants to optimize their field service delivery or their technician’s schedule. But what is optimization? Why do we need to optimize? What are the best techniques to optimize? 

We have answers to these questions.  We have come up with an article that includes information on field service optimization and its methods to improve performance.

What is Field Service Optimization?

In simple words, field service optimization allows you to:

• Enhance customer experience
• Increase workforce efficiency
• Reduce costs

Field service optimization is not limited to only a single person working in the company. Instead, it is a company-wide endeavor. In simple words, it must be used by everyone, including CEOs, service managers,  technicians, warehouse hands, dispatchers, and call center agents.

This also means a drastic shift in the service delivery model and how an organization goes about its day-to-day business in many moving parts.

Key Areas to Optimize for Field Services

There are specific primary areas where the services are optimized, below is the list:

1. Service agreements

The first area where field services solution helps to optimize is service level agreement (SLA). A service Agreement is a contract that ensures performance with penalties for not achieving determined elements and not completing the task. It is because customers seek the solution at the right time with the right tools and from the right people.

2. Work order management

A work order records the project job or task assigned to employees with information such as what types of products and services, different work, and a list of numerous assigned tasks. The field service solution helps to optimize all data in one place. 

3. On-site performance 

Fieldwork is all about on-site work and being in the field service industry; it is essential to know the performance going in the field. The solution helps to know on-site performance with time-tracking, dispatching, and all work performed details. It will help you to understand which parts to improve and be accountable for work.

4. Revenue generation

The field service solution makes the work and payment process manageable with its automation process. With the use of the solution, a trained technician can close the deal with an e-signature or credit card payment. Whether it is a home or office, a task can be done and helps to generate more revenue. 

5. Travel and expense recording

Recording travel and expenses have supported reducing customer problems and decreasing the billing cycle. Also, it helps to collect bills and payments on time, which leads to fewer outstanding bills.

​​How to Optimize Field Service Business Process

Let us now understand how you can optimize your field service business operations by applying various automation methods.

1. Service Scheduling Optimization

One of the essential steps you need to perform is optimizing the complex service schedule in your business.

Field service technicians are highly trained, skilled, and have a solid capability to perform optimization to have no chances for miscommunication, delays, or incomplete information.

Nowadays, a field service agent can easily use route optimization technology to reach the customer’s location, identify the problem, and provide the best services. It enables efficient productivity and less schedule cost than manual or rules-based solutions.

By using optimized scheduling, “>you improve both team’s productivity and business efficiency. Moreover, it reduces service costs, optimizing growth, delivering exceptional customer experience, and achieving great success. 

2. Implement Paperless Job Sheet and Reports

With the help of paperless job sheets, you can digitize your field service firm and improve customer relationships using mobile apps. But, on the other hand, you and even field service agents need to wait for days and even weeks to get the invoices by using paper job sheets. 

By implementing outdated systems, field technicians become less motivated over time, causing them to complete the available work orders at the end of the day. In addition, it leads to unnecessary stress and other conflicts to perform the tasks.  So, you need an optimum solution to get rid of such complexities.

A paperless job sheet system helps you drive through various internal and external business processes from start to finish. As a result, it provides the best way to make a good impression among your customers and enhances business productivity.

Through modernization, it’s often possible to improve employee engagement because they’ll recognize their employer’s efforts to empower them to do their job to the best of their capabilities.

3. Real-time Field Staff and Job Status Tracking

Scheduling and tracking the field staff is an essential metric to consider during the optimization process.

You can efficiently control field employees in many ways like:

• Creating schedules for field technicians
• Monitoring the real-time location
• Assign and check the job status
• Evaluate performance

Moreover, you can optimize the technician’s scheduling by considering the following factors: The technician’s travel time and the level of expertise required. 

4. Online Invoicing and Payment

The essential metrics you need to take care of are creating and managing online invoices for your customers. 

First of all, your customer’s invoice must match their estimates as it plays a significant role in providing the best customer satisfaction. So, you need to deal with expectation management where the estimate should represent your customer’s demands.

Your invoice must clearly define and include every service detail, making it easy for the customers to read. One of the best practices that field service techs need to perform is to verify the invoice with the service manager to get rid of everyday mistakes. Once verified, it can be delivered to the customers.

Payment processing is the next important thing that your customers need to perform once the invoice is ready. You can allow your customers to perform payment using cash, credit/debit cards, or even directly from their bank account. 

5. Quick and On-Time Customer Support and Services

As per the recent survey by McKinsey, digital customer assistance can easily create significant business value and boost customer engagement.

Field employees are one and only one representative of your field service organizations. For multiple customers, it’s the only interaction platform where they can share their problems via digital channels like email or outbound IVR campaigns.

Rather than creating service requests or making service request calls, you need to focus on quality fixes and prevent future service failures. This can prolong the time on site for your technician, but it dramatically improves customer satisfaction and identifies the scope of improvements therein. Also, you can easily enhance the business performance by increasing the business priorities, team availability, data, and resources.

Apart from all these fundamental approaches, you can also adopt a field service software solution in your firm. It is a companywide approach to field service delivery. Such solutions help you to create job schedules easily, track your technicians, and even generate reports with ease. 

Conclusion

We hope you understand how different optimization techniques help you to improve the performance of your field service business. Your field service technicians visit customers’ locations and deliver the best services to them, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction and employee productivity on a large scale.

When it comes to adopting the service scheduler software to manage everything from scheduling to employees and payments, look no further than FieldCamp. It is an advanced field service management software that makes it easy for you to optimize almost all business operations. For example, FieldCamp allows field service agents to view a list of tasks to perform on specific days, and managers keep track of them.