Field Service Management Best Practices for COVID-19 and Other Challenging Times

How should field service businesses navigate these difficult times?

In the field service industry, field technicians serve as the face of their companies. In this ever-changing business, companies strive to deliver a first-class customer experience, thus differentiating themselves from the competition. In the challenging times brought about by COVID-19, delivering that experience means more than ever, and getting it right the first time has become a more critical consideration than ever before.

For routine service calls, new installations, or emergencies, you need to keep your clients’ needs in mind, preparing your service technicians to handle everything the job throws at them. Now more than ever, you need a way to easily schedule jobs, keep inventory on hand, and manage your employees from anywhere. 

With the pandemic and the rise of remote work, it has become more difficult to manage your field service staff. Many companies got caught off guard when trying to adapt to new operating procedures and provide uninterrupted service to clients. What can you do to ensure the success of your company and your front line field service technicians moving forward? 

Improve the efficiency of your field service technicians.

Make sure that your technicians have an optimized schedule. Set them up for success by arming your service technicians with mobile field service technology. A digital system can optimize their service route, reduce windshield time, and allow for digital forms and contactless payments. This will go a long way to providing safe, world-class service to your customers.  

Smart Service (or the cloud-based web app Smart Service 365) checks all of these boxes. Both deliver route optimization, fillable forms, and contactless payments, giving your front line staff everything they need. Both solutions offer the ability to keep your office and field staff in constant communication throughout the work day. Smart Service offers text alerts to notify clients when their service technician are in route. This helps make sure customers have the job site ready and technicians and clients can maintain social distancing.

The ability to take contactless payments is also key in these challenging times. A technician needs the ability to send an invoice that allows customers to simply click a button and pay online. This ensures you get paid without putting your clients or employees in harm’s way. 

Completing the work properly, the first time.

Setting your field service technicians up for success starts with improving efficiency, but you also have to make sure the right tech gets scheduled for the job and they have all of the tools, supplies, and parts they need to complete the work the first time around. Utilizing inventory controls and skillset-specific scheduling lets you rest assured that the job will get completed the first time when at all possible. Nothing causes more stress (for both clients and employees) than when the tech can’t fix the issue and has to come back later to get the job done. Sometimes you can’t avoid this, but making sure your technicians have everything they need makes everyone’s life easier.

Smart Service offers the ability to assign skillsets to technicians, and only shows the specific technicians qualified and available to complete a specific call. Likewise, Smart Service offers the ability to track inventory on the warehouse or service vehicle level to make sure you have the right parts available. No more wasted trips to the store to get a part, Smart Service makes inventory control quick and easy so your technicians have everything they need to get the job done right the first time.  

Become the solution before your client knows there’s even a problem.

Preventing an issue before it becomes a problem does a lot for client satisfaction and helps you schedule out jobs in the future. By utilizing a preventive maintenance program for clients based on operational hours or seasonal maintenance, you can prevent unneeded service calls to fix an issue that might have been prevented.  

Having the ability to track past services and provide visibility to your staff and clients on previous jobs helps you stay out in front of any costly issues. Automatically schedule preventive maintenance or use reporting to gather data on equipment due for service. These steps will help increase technician productivity and efficiency. 

Smart Service offers the ability to do all of this. You can schedule routine maintenance on a set schedule and document equipment service records that all live under the customer profile. This makes the information easy to report on if necessary. Giving you and your technicians the ability to prevent any serious maintenance issues for your clients increases their satisfaction level.  

Utilizing field service technology to increase technician efficiency, complete the job the first time, and prevent issues through routine maintenance will help you provide excellent service in the challenging times we now face.  Having a system in place that gives your front line staff the ability to do the job right the first time and do it in the most efficient manner not only helps drive your bottom line, but also ensures that you create raving fans of your business.