How to Automate Your Field Service Business

Forbes’s recent report spilled the beans on employees’ performance by highlighting that approximately 73% of professionals do 50+ repetitive tasks in a week. These statistics reveal the biggest reasons behind the productivity decline of personnel, including those in field service businesses. 

However, the technological advancements and increasing trend of AI-led field service automation have tremendously changed this scenario. 

On one side, automating the field service business saves time and workers’ effort, and on the other side, it improves their productivity and increases focus on their core job. 

Furthermore, field service automation can increase profitability, enable seamless communication and collaboration among employees, minimize the chances of errors, and render other numerous benefits. 

But how can you automate your field service business? Read this blog to learn the insider secrets of field service business automation. 

We have thoroughly explained field service automation, its benefits, ways to automate your field service business, and features to look for while choosing a field service automation solution.

What is Field Service Automation?

Field service automation or FSA is about streamlining and automating various time-intensive and repetitive tasks that fieldforce professionals have to perform on a daily basis. 

These tasks include scheduling and dispatching technicians, optimizing routes, managing work orders, generating reports and invoices, ensuring transparent and regular communication between field service workers and in-office employees.

Benefits You Get with Field Service Automation

With the automation of field service operations, one can get many benefits in terms of productivity, customer satisfaction, costs, and better management. Here is how:

Increased Operational Efficiency and Productivity

When you choose to automate your field service business, you can ensure increased operational efficiency. Automation led by field service automation software streamlines scheduling, dispatching, and other processes while offering workers real-time task updates, optimized routes. This improves efficiency as there are almost zero chances for software to make mistakes.

Besides, it eliminates the field service workers from the hassle of performing these tasks manually, which saves time and administrative overheads. With this, field service personnel can complete more field tasks.

Enhanced Customer Satisfaction

A field service business that uses automation solutions can not only streamline their internal operations but also provide accurate and timely updates to customers. That too, without any manual intervention. Responding to customers’ queries faster results in improved customer experience. 

Moreover, AI-driven insights on each customer’s preferences also enable your fieldforce to offer personalized services.

Minimized Operational Costs

With auto management of field service tasks, businesses can ensure well-optimized routes that their workers can follow to complete their tasks. This ensures timely completion of each task and a significant reduction in travel time and fuel costs.

Data Insights

Field service automation solutions can process crucial data associated with customers’ preferences and your field service agents’ performance. They provide real-time insights based on which field service companies can make data-driven decisions to improve their services, assess their employees’ performance, and manage inventory levels to prevent overflow and stock-outs.

Ease of Scaling

Having the right field service automation tools, field service agents don’t need to worry about repetitive and time-consuming tasks. The tools help them to handle more work without hampering performance as they have to focus only on their core job. This also ensures your field service business can scale its operations as it expands its horizon.

How to Automate Your Field Service Business

Below are some proven ways of automating your field service business:

Employ Smart Job Scheduling

Smart job scheduling means assigning tasks considering skill sets, experience, real-time location, job priority, and other crucial factors. Giving the right professional the right job improves efficiency and customer satisfaction. 

Doing this manually is challenging, therefore, employ an advanced field force automation tool that is capable of doing this without manual intervention.

Ensure Predictive Maintenance

Offer predictive maintenance to ensure flawless functioning or running of the equipment or machines you sell to your customers. 

For example, if you are a commercial HVAC company, leverage IoT systems or sensors attached to your equipment to predict the right time of maintenance for your equipment or machine, before it actually stops working due to a breakdown or failure.

Auto-Populate Forums

Provide your field force an option to automate filling of forums to streamline data entry and avoid the hassle of typing the work done. With this, your field employees would be able to integrate customer data, job details, and other crucial information in no time.

Real-time Status Update

Provide your customers a way to get real-time updates on their service request’s progress, the assigned technician’s location, estimated arrival time, and estimated completion time. This transparency would bring customer satisfaction while building a positive image for your company.

Automate Payroll Management

Integrate field force automation tools that can automate payroll management considering accurate time tracking, data and insights on job completion, total hours worked, total distance traveled, and other factors. 

Implementing a field service automation tool is the best way to offer all aforementioned ways to improve your field force productivity, achieve operational efficiency, and ensure customer satisfaction.

Features to Look for in a Field Service Automation Solution

While choosing a field force automation solution, these are the features you need to look out for:

• AI-powered facial recognition so that your field personnel can mark their attendance from anywhere. 
• AI-powered facial scans to allow only authorized users to access your business data.
• A feature to manually mark attendance by entering given credentials.
• Real-time location tracking to keep track of your field force.
• An option to track the total distance covered by each field service professional.
• Multi-device compatibility to ensure seamless access of the solution.
• Automation of logging and tracking of meetings as soon as a field service professional enters a predefined geography. 
• A feature to record and attach voice notes about the meeting.
• Real-time insights on breaks, total work hours, and other aspects associated with your fieldforce performance.

To find such a solution, you don’t need to go anywhere. Connect with wAnywhere and get an advanced fieldforce automation solution that can increase productivity by 95%, team performance by 52%, and improve attendance by 15%.

Conclusion

With field service automation, you can improve efficiency, increase productivity, reduce operational costs, and get many other amazing benefits. Such a solution can also be a key contributor to enhancing customer satisfaction by enabling your fieldforce to offer better and more personalized services while ensuring that each task is completed within predefined time. 

Explore this blog to learn more about field service automation, detailed advantages, and the best ways to achieve it. If you wish to get a field service automation solution, equipped wth top-notch features, connect with wAnywhere.