Today’s customers expect on-time delivery and consider this an essential factor for making a repeat purchase. Such metrics are even more important for a field service business where on-time delivery is vital for business profitability and customer satisfaction.
A critical way to improve service delivery timelines is to optimize scheduling and dispatching workflows via digitization. Read more to understand how automating dispatch functions help in timely service delivery.
Challenges in scheduling and dispatching that cause service delay
Here are five pressing challenges faced by a field service business in its dispatching operations that lead to poor servicing timelines:
- Inefficient resource allocation: on-time availability of equipment, material, or tools is necessary to ensure on-time service delivery. Waiting just for resources highlights your inefficient inventory management to customers.
- Traffic or unoptimized routing: manually finding the right way can get time-consuming, and it is often difficult to predict traffic. This is a common reason for service delays and unproductive time spent by field service technicians.
- Poor on-job visibility: with many field services involving remote job sites, it is difficult to stay updated on the work’s progress. This makes it difficult to troubleshoot on-time and workers may have to wait for experts to reach the job site.
- Paperwork-based documenting: it takes time to fill up forms, record observations, or track progress on paper-based sheets. Managing, retrieving information, and making sense of it on time is difficult in manual or paper-based operations.
- Unscalable operations: a field service business isn’t usually recurring in nature. With more job requests, it is not simple to keep up with available inventory or maintain worker productivity.
How to optimize dispatch functions to ensure timely service delivery?
Field service management software helps automate any field service operation, including scheduling and dispatching tasks. Here are five key ways in which field service management software helps streamline dispatching workflows:
Manage and allocate tasks efficiently
Field service management software removes the guesswork from assigning tasks and resources to a field service technician. Based on their location, existing routes, skills, availability, and many other factors, software easily allocates and organizes the work. This minimizes delays in attending to the customer leading them to experience prompt field servicing.
Optimize travel routes to save time
Zuper, a field service management software utilizes GPS technology to find the most efficient way to reach the job site. It considers real-time traffic data, jobs to be done on the route, and time to find the best available route. This saves fuel costs and ensures your field service technicians attend to maximum customers in a single trip. Route optimization while dispatching improves your profitability and customer experience.
Assignment of tasks based on priority
Some tasks may require urgent attention due to their complexity or the consequences involved. A field service management software identifies such jobs and ensures they are completed on priority. A field service business can also offer priority servicing as a paid option to its customers. Implementing such privileges also requires help from software to manage such requests.
Real-time monitoring of job progress
Equipping your field service technicians with a field service management app helps you get real-time updates on the job status. It is possible to alert the back-office or management teams about any delays or issues to take proactive measures. The software can also predict any potential roadblocks to ensure relevant prevention measures are implemented. Analyzing past and real-time data armor a field service business avoids problems and solves them immediately to avoid service delays.
Manage scheduling and dispatching via the dashboard
A field service management software includes a dashboard that helps your back-office teams implement any job changes in real time. It is possible to customize the dashboard based on KPIs measures by your team and optimize them by managing on-ground operations. For example, the dashboard would alert you when the Estimated Time of Arrival or ETA of your field service technician increases. With such global visibility, missing out on details that cause service delivery is difficult.
Automate dispatch operations to improve service delivery time today
Scheduling and dispatching form an important operational workflow that holds the key to improving delivery time. If you’re a field service business aiming to optimize dispatch functions, book a demo to check out Zuper’s intelligent dispatching solutions.