This is a guest post by Zuper.
Today’s customers are accustomed to seamless digital experiences in various aspects of their life, ranging from grocery shopping to vacation booking. These experiences have set their expectations high, and they expect that near-flawless digital experience in field services too. A recent CSG international report states that nearly 89% of the customers expect an “Uber-Like” experience that provides technician location and continually updated estimated arrival times.
What’s more, field service management is a domain that is fraught with complexity. This is because of multiple tools, diverse customer bases, too many stakeholders, frequent collaborations, ever-changing requirements, and more. Irrespective of the size of your business, efficient field service management is a critical component for ensuring customer happiness and satisfaction.
A recent Finances Online report shows that businesses that manage their field operations effectively grow 2x times faster than their peers who ignore field service automation. An ideal field service management tool will not only help an organization shorten its service cycle, but also forge better customer relationships by enabling customer loyalty and, ultimately, growth.
Here are six warning signs that indicate it's time for your business to start thinking about field service automation:
Data is everywhere and there are multiple systems of records
When every department in your organization maintains its own disparate system of records, you will have trouble getting a 360-degree view of your field service operations. As a result, each team starts operating independently based on the fragmented data stored in their own silos. What’s worse, when you have no clue which system of records is accurate even after substantial deduplication efforts, decisions taken based on that data become ineffective and inaccurate.
Every day is a challenge for your back-office teams
When your service teams have little to no visibility on critical information like customer preferences, historical data, and service agent location, they have trouble resolving customer problems. This can result in a bad customer experience and all-time-low CSAT levels.
When there's no way available to track conversations between your back-office team and field workforce team, it's impossible to stay on top of a customer's history and current needs. This leads to issues like improper handling of ad-hoc requests and inability to make informed decisions.
Your customers are frustrated and irate most of the time
No one likes being left in the dark. When someone is forced to wait for a long time with no visibility of the ETA of a technician or is forced to make multiple calls to retrieve their service request status, even your staunchest advocates run the risk of becoming your frustrated foes.
Scheduling conflicts have become a norm
As much as your field agents are enthused and determined to complete every service request on time, their schedules are often plagued with conflicts. If you’re using manual scheduling, it can get remarkably confusing when you have multiple reschedules. Your field agents need a smart scheduling process that's more nuanced than what a simple calendar interface can handle.
To keep up with unpredictable scheduling requests, your back-office team and dispatchers need access to customer preferences, the real-time location of your field workforce, and team utilization metrics of your field workforce. A field service management tool will offer your team all of this and other add-ons like a built-in chat interface, route optimization aspects, and more.
The statuses of your service requests are muddled at best
To deliver an exceptional quality of service that keeps your customers happy and loyal, you need a transparent process. All stakeholders must be able to track the status of a service request at any time.
In a manual field service environment, it's nearly impossible to accomplish this task without seeking the help of multiple people, asking them a ton of questions, and giving them time to understand the context and provide you with the data you need. Field service automation with platforms such as Zuper, on the other hand, gives you access to a 360-degree view of your service requests, customer data, and employees.
Policy and regulatory compliance is always a hassle
Process and regulatory compliance are often overlooked in a manual field service environment. When you struggle to hold people accountable to get their job done effectively and accurately, it can end up costing operational risks like buck-passing, scapegoating, employee time theft, and other associated process bottlenecks.
Modern field service solutions allow organizations to spot and eliminate security risks with features like facial recognition, role-based access, conditional visibility, and more.
Summing it all up
If any of these scenarios sound familiar to you, it's time to consider investing in a field service management tool. Such integrations can help your business streamline your field service operations and steer it towards sustainable success.
Organizations that use Zuper Field Service Management with their Zoho CRM save up to 20 hours per week per user by reducing manual intervention and improving workforce efficiency from day one. The Zoho CRM - Zuper integration will eliminate disparate systems, break down data silos, and supercharge your employees to offer unsurpassed customer experience.
If you’re looking for ways to take your customer experience up a notch, the right thing to do is digitizing, automating, and optimizing your customer operations. It can double your employee productivity while also increasing your customer satisfaction.
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