Traditionally, companies have had a hard time balancing customer experience with the cost to provide service delivery. With innovations in field management, it’s getting a whole lot easier.
Customer Experience Plays a Crucial Role in Success
After all, your technicians interact directly with your customers. It’s well-known that customer experience can make or break a company, but it’s less known that the post-sale contributes up to 80 percent of core business profits. This is especially true now that so many businesses bring in most of the revenue through offerings associated with their products, rather than the products themselves.
Streamlining Scheduling and Dispatch
At the heart of FSM is the optimization of schedules and dispatch. Advanced FSM tools can take into account technician skills, location, availability, and even traffic conditions to assign the right technician to the right job at the right time. This means fewer missed appointments, shorter wait times, and thus, an enhanced customer experience.
Improving First-Time Fix Rates
Nothing frustrates a customer more than recurring issues. FSM tools can improve first-time fix rates by ensuring technicians have access to the right information and resources. With real-time access to customer history, previous work orders, and even detailed equipment information, technicians can quickly identify and fix problems, often during the first visit.
Driving Preventive Maintenance
One of the significant advantages of FSM is the ability to drive preventive maintenance. Using historical data, predictive analytics, and IoT-enabled equipment, FSM tools can forecast when equipment is likely to fail and schedule preventive maintenance. This proactivity results in fewer equipment breakdowns, reducing customer inconvenience.
Empowering Customers with Self-Service Portals
FSM is also about empowering customers. Self-service portals offer customers a platform to create service requests, track technician location, and access real-time updates. This level of transparency and control significantly enhances the overall customer experience.
Boosting Technician Efficiency
Technician efficiency is directly linked to customer satisfaction. FSM tools provide technicians with route optimization, real-time inventory access, and mobile capabilities that reduce time wasted on paperwork or travelling. By spending more time on the job, technicians can deliver a higher level of service to customers.
Enhancing Customer Communication
Finally, FSM plays a crucial role in enhancing customer communication. Automated notifications, real-time updates, and simple feedback mechanisms make the service process more transparent and engaging for customers. This active communication builds trust and improves customer satisfaction.
A decade or two ago most businesses in-sourced service delivery
They handled everything themselves, from entitlement validation to remote triage, dispatch of parts and technicians and even on-site repairs. While in-sourcing is a delivery methodology, it certainly isn’t cost effective. Why? Productivity, that’s why. Neither technicians nor the capital assets associated with FSM Software are ever fully utilized. That’s because there’s more than just being on-site installing and servicing products. When you think about utilization, you have to account for drive time to and from customer sites, sick days, vacations, administrative time and vehicle maintenance. So, while you’re fully burdened with all of these costs, you’re not actually reaping the full value, nor the full productivity of your engineers.
Most companies that outsource delivery rely on a limited number of field labor providers. However, that puts you at a significant disadvantage since you’re locked into their technicians and cost structure. Plus, you’re still dealing with that pesky productivity issue.
The best way to deliver flawless work at dramatically lower costs is to source from a pool of best-in-class providers, select the best-fit option and only pay for the resource you use for that event.
Organizations across industries are reporting a real need to drive costs down even further, but most importantly, to do so without sacrificing quality or customer experience. This is spawning the next evolution in delivery built around dynamic labor marketplaces and a pay-per-event model.
So how do you accomplish this?
It’s not something that can be achieved by installing or subscribing to new applications such as garage door software or janitorial software and using free tools like a pressure washing estimate template and research ideas like how to setup a plumbing van to optimize success. Success requires a partner network to generate organic competition for every event. Additionally, it requires advanced analytics to stack rank the top provider options with an Uber-like star rating, and a single point of responsibility for managing the end-to-end event.