A recent study by Aberdeen Group found that service organizations whose workers serve customers from the field put reduced margins at the top of the current challenges list. Changing customer dynamics and increasing competition followed closely behind. The good news is that all three of these challenges can be improved when your business management systems are fully integrated with ERP.
Improve Scheduling To Optimize Service Tech Productivity
By automating the scheduling processes, you can apply rules to manage priorities and best routes to keep service techs working and customers happy. Keep you technicians informed of schedule changes with alerts delivered to their mobile device.
Asking your customers to wait hours for the technician to arrive doesn’t go over too well these days. When field service techs are connected to the back office of the business, the dispatchers in the office can schedule with confidence and notify customers when there will be an unexpected delay.
Put Information In The Hands Of Workers To Diagnose Problems In Fewer Calls
With full information delivered to a mobile device, technicians can get to work without having to ask customers questions that have already been answered. Access to product specs and parts inventory allows technicians to give customers answers to cost and timing questions on the spot. With complete product service information available through their mobile device, field techs can research the problem and solve the issue on the first call.
Accelerate Billing Times For Faster Cash Turnaround
For many organizations, bills don’t go out until the service tech has returned to the office and turned in paper work orders. Entering service call information is time consuming and error-prone. When service techs are connected to ERP through mobile devices in the field, you can bill the customer before the truck leaves the driveway.
Monthly maintenance contracts are a popular replacement for expensive annual payments. Can you offer your customers the convenience of automated monthly billing? ERP will allow you to automate the contract billing and collection processes to streamline cash flow.
There are many more ways that connected data – delivered to and from the field – will help your service teams improve profits. Let’s talk about how we can make your service business improve margins and deliver on customer expectations.
Published on 3rd January 2014 by Jeanne DeWitt.
