Field Employees are the most important assets of any service company as they are the contact points for the customers. Good technicians are ambassador of your company and hard to find and keeping them happy on the job is going to reflect on services that they will provide. This article describes how cloud based Field Service CRM like Field Force Tracker can help you in increasing job satisfaction and at the same time, improve your company’s profitability.
Customers know your company by your technician’s name. Field service engineers have more face-to-face contact with customers than any other part of a business. They’re responsible for sales, installation, maintenance, support, and other tasks that require direct access to the products and services a business provides. They also have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction. As a result, they are the most valuable members of a service chain. Empowering them with the right training, the right information and the right technology enables them to help build the reputation of the business, and also makes them a key to company growth and increasing business revenue.
Field Service Employees As Customer Ambassador
Service Agreements are keys to any business. But validating contracts in the field requires a software like Field Force Tracker. There are a number of checks and balances that must be maintained to properly service equipment in the field. A field service worker must be aware of the customer support agreements (CSA), and they must be aware of the customer’s history, service status and details of warranties that are in place. They also must track on truck and be aware of off-truck inventory, while ensuring that any services rendered are properly invoiced. In an industry such as manufacturing, they must also ensure that checklists are followed for safety and compliance, all while managing travel and delivering quality service and training.
Failure to maintain software and follow standards for these tasks can be stressful. The more stressful a process is – or if there’s not a process in place at all – the more likely it is that a field service worker will burn out and move on to another employer who provides an easier work environment.
Employee churn can be very expensive. With their exit, they take knowledge and possible customer relationships with them. And when dealing with specialized equipment, the range of qualified candidates may be limited; thereby lengthening the timeframe it may take to hire a replacement. In the meantime, your dispatchers struggle to provide coverage for requests, your remaining field workers feel additional pressure to perform, and your customers may suffer by receiving less than stellar care.
Financial impact of employee churn
Losing an employee is bad for a business. The financial impact can be very damaging as well. For example, for an entry-level worker making $20.00 per hour/$41,600 per year wages requires almost a month to recruit. Then a similar amount must be spent on search, interviewing, on-boarding and training of their replacement
The more specialized the employee, the higher the percentage is to replace them, upwards of 300% of their annual pay. Note that this does not include the administrative and technology costs for their departure. The exit interview, resetting of equipment and passwords, and managing their customer relationships all add to the tally.
Reducing Employee Churn in the Field Service Organization
Every company is concerned about maintaining a stable environment, It must make an attempt to stop this churn and retain its field service workers. Reducing the stress they experience in daily operations is a key element in keeping engineers happy. Moving from a paper-based system and optimizing your service chain provides a streamlined environment for both your field service workers and your back office (who may also be prone to churn due to inefficiencies). Field service management can:
- Deploy Field Force Tracker – one of the best Field Service Software. Connect your field operations with dispatch and your back office to ensure seamless, bidirectional communication
- Improve safety numbers by reducing distractions while en route to the customer
- Decrease frustration for field service workers by providing account history, agreements, contracts, and checklists within the application
- Improve first-time fix rates, enabling the worker to close a job out and focus on the next
- Reduce the travel time between jobs, delivering for greater efficiency and less time on the road and in potentially poor traffic conditions
Each of these points play a part in reducing the stress for your field service workers. It also helps them to feel more confident about each customer they service because they are equipped with the tools and information they need to deliver quality service.
Recruiting and Training New employees
Employees leave for a variety of reasons. Some of your employees left because your service processes were very cumbersome. By employing field service management into your business, you will become the company good candidates seek, empowering your to choose from a wider selection and find those who fit your company’s culture. Also, that meets the needed expertise for the position. In addition, more candidates means a shorter and less expensive search period.
The use of field service management process for operations can bring candidates that will not come to you otherwise. You may search for candidates that already have experience working with technology when making service calls; however, to ensure that you have the best opportunity to make the best placement, you could also note in the description that training is provided. An intuitive, easy-to-use system will ensure that with the right candidate, the learning curve will remain simple.
It’s worth noting that companies that have employed a field service management process into their operations have realized a big gain in the retention.
Field service management is helpful in cutting waste and improving profitability. It can provide your business with the tools your field service workers need to better serve your customers. By reducing the stress in their day-to-day operations, a business not only makes it a more pleasant work environment for existing employees, but is empowered with an asset to recruit the best talent for your organization.
Enhancing Value Using Field Force Tracker
An easy to use service software can help everyone in the company to better manage the effectiveness of your service delivery. Using extensive capabilities of Field Force Tracker’s software, you can improve the effectiveness for field services in your organization. Deploying a rich cloud based field service CRM software with mobile apps can improve your ability to manage your business. This facilitates service managers to better management of your service resources in the most cost effective way.
Service companies in all parts of the world are trying to move to electronic model of providing services. Paper based operation is too slow to address customer concerns and cannot provide suitable data analysis to the business. Field Force Tracker is the most comprehensive software for field service management. It takes care of everything from customer management to the payment collection for a service company. By using this software, our clients can see major improvement in their productivity and the customer satisfaction. Service managers are constantly working to improve the quality and effectiveness of their service delivery with Field Force Tracker.
Why Field Force Tracker
Mobile enabled, cloud-based field service software was designed to provide ease of use with incredible flexibility. Along with the ease – and speed – of our implementation and the ongoing support service that we provide we enable companies to take full advantage of today’s mobile field service.
Field Force Tracker’s power mobile apps for iPhone and Android are available to all new and existing Field Force Tracker customers. They can extend the feature set with the enhanced mobile forms capabilities, and better system integration. Field Force Tracker, a mobile enabled web-based field service management software, streamlines technician scheduling, dispatch, customer management, vendor and employee management, work orders, equipment maintenance, inventory tracking, contracts, estimates, invoices, payments and accounting. It is considered one of the most feature rich software of its kind.
About Field Force Tracker
Force Tracker (http://www.fieldforcetracker.com) is a leading global provider of its award winning mobile workforce solutions for service-based businesses of all sizes delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS). Its solutions enable businesses of all sizes (from 1 user to 10,000 users) to meet the challenges associated with managing and running complex service operations. It helps in improving the productivity of their mobile workforce.
With Field Force Tracker customers can create service schedule and route quickly, dispatch sooner, collect correct information at once in the field and invoice faster. The field service software makes it easy for users to eliminate waste, get more done in less time and be more profitable.
Field Force Tracker is a wholly owned unit of Rapidsoft Systems Inc. (http://www.rapidsoftsystems.com). Rapidsoft Systems, Inc. has its main office in Princeton, NJ, USA, a US R&D Center in Mercerville NJ, and sales, support and development offices in Palo Alto, CA, USA, Singapore, Dubai (UAE), Bombay, and Noida (India).
