Managing a field service business is like driving changing tires in the Formula 1 blindfolded. Bookings fly in and customers want it done now, but you have no visibility of field staff and how they do their job. As you get more bookings and you want to scale up to meet demand there are some problem areas to look out for that are geared towards field services.

1. Communication issues can get out of hand

Every business struggles with communication at some point, however teams on the road experience the pain more than most. For every job there is a chance for either your staff or your customer to be late.

Start by providing direct, real-time, communication between your field staff and the customer so they can work it out any comms issues themselves. Ideally you want records, and digital communication is typically best but also allow for phone calls as a last resort. Social apps like slack and Whatsapp have set the standard for easy to use realtime digital comms. However as business communications become more critical these social platforms are a risk due to security concerns and data integrity. They also are only really designed for very basic business work flows.

2. Lack of quality checks

Good quality is good for business. If your work is good enough to keep your customers coming back then it helps cash flow and ongoing revenue not to mention new business from referrals. While avoiding poor quality reduces your expenses by having to redo jobs and all the associated wasted time. With staff in the field it can be difficult to constantly check the quality and check sufficient standards are being met.

Look to put in place quality systems that help your field staff record how good their work is by taking photos of work before and after completion. Add quality checks to your processes so that your field staff have independent reviews of their work. This way they can be trained to get the balance right between quality and speed. Benefits of sophisticated quality management systems are many but be careful to get the balance right between cost and benefit.

3. Onsite changes are hard to manage

So you have taken a booking online, dispatched someone to do the job, and everything is well organized. Then your staff gets on site and reality kicks in. The original scope of works has items missing, the customer left out important details, extra parts are required, and on top of it your staff does not know whether they should call someone or just get on with it. Not being able to handle this situation will lead to wasted time to sort things out and hurts the bottomline through increased job costs.

Again look to give your team tools to let them do their work and make decisions on the fly. Look at systems and software that give access to your parts list, and allow for ease of communication between supervisors, staff and customers. Most of all look to help the customer win by getting their issue sorted as quick as possible.

*Real-time Communication and Transparency around communication between customer, business and service professional allows for decisions to be made on the fly. This has benefits for all parties. Company doesn’t need to dispatch a resource back to the same site which costs them time and money. Service Professional doesn’t waste their time and have to go back to the same site to do a job.

4. Streamline business process

Every field service business needs to take bookings, schedule jobs, route workers and invoice customers. These tasks make it difficult for your company to grow as they require hiring staff, increased training and more supervision.

However these tasks also offer an opportunity as they are pretty well suited to automation via software. Automation typically has good payback based on improved labor efficiency, and increased profitability due to less money spent on labor.

5. No access to PC’s in the field

So you have established you want to use software to help you scale your business and you want to select a provider. Today we are spoilt for choices of software to improve our systems. Unfortunately many of this legacy software is typically designed for desktop computers, with features on mobile being limited. Having less features on mobile means that your field staff are also limited by what they can do.

It is 2019, the world is mobile and so is your field service business. Identify solutions that focus on delivering mobile solutions because it will increase your field staff capability and streamline their work.

Conclusion

Field service businesses are tough to manage and even tougher to scale but if you can add the right systems and leverage technology you will be well on your way to scaling up your business.