11 Aug Using Mobile Apps to Drive Business Value in Field Service Management
In today’s highly competitive marketplace, same day fulfillment and customer-centric service delivery are crucial. Often the first and last touch points of customer service, your field technicians’ ability to delight or even satisfy is driven by the soundness and efficiency of their mobile processes.
Refined mobile processes allow companies to improve communications with the field, increase productivity, streamline service delivery and enhance customer relations and loyalty. They also lead to higher first-time fix rates, which leads to more satisfied customers, quicker task completion, the capability to complete more work, and ultimately more revenue!
Examples of mobile processes might include delivering and installing equipment, making repairs, performing maintenance or upgrades, managing and tracking inventory, processing tasks and requests, or completing surveys.
Your organization dispatches field technicians to perform these tasks based on a combination of business needs, schedule, priorities and the skillset of each technician. And then you have an expectation that your field techs will get the work completed in an optimal fashion. You design specific procedures for them to follow to ensure an optimal outcome.
Mobile apps that are used by your field service technicians need to support and strictly enforce the exact mobile process that you have designed for them to follow. You created that process to ensure that your customers get the best service possible, your technicians complete their job as quickly and easily as possible, and your business runs as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
That mobile process is critical to your organization’s success, and your business depends on each technician following it consistently and reliably. In fact, reliable and consistent adherence to the process allows you to monitor, evaluate and tweak it over time, giving you a mechanism for continual process improvement.
One of our customers was being fined $500,000 per month because it was not meeting SLAs and was being penalized for failed regulatory compliance. Sometimes, correct procedures weren’t being followed or tasks were being performed out-of-order, which required re-work or corrections later. This meant that unnecessary work was being performed, making field technicians less efficient, extending the timeframe on tasks and work orders, and negatively affecting productivity.
In other cases, field techs were able to perform their tasks in a timely fashion, but were unable to correctly report activity completion because tasks were performed while the techs were offline, often in the middle of the ocean! Because they couldn’t prove that the tasks had been completed on time, their SLAs suffered artificially. Providing a tool for this organization’s field technicians that forces a consistent process and that works offline without network connectivity saves this organization nearly $6M per year!
In another situation, daily sales outstanding (DSO) was taking a hit to the tune of $10,000 per day due to delays getting completed work orders into the system. The ability to reduce DSO by just one day saves the company over $3M per year in cash flow!
These figures are critical because at the end of the day, the decision on whether to make a process improvement for the business is greatly influenced by its effect on revenue and profit. A strong monetary impact from optimized mobile field services operations should be expected and tracked. As you can see, it is not unusual for organizations to save millions of dollars per year by reducing missed SLAs, improving billing and collection procedures, and creating an effective, collaborative, highly productive environment for their entire team. Additionally, the ability to create an optimal mobile experience for your field agents will ensure that your field agents, in turn, will deliver an optimal service experience to your customers, increasing customer satisfaction and retention rates.
The bottom line is that the mobile solution you implement for your field agents is not just a necessary piece of technology that they need to get the job done; it determines the quality of your work in the field, can set you apart from your competitors, and influence your company’s image to your customers. If these things are important to you, contact Mobile Reach, because the quality of your field experience is all we care about!