Scheduling is a critical workflow in field service business which can make or break your company’s reputation and service delivery. It involves key tasks like understanding work orders, finding the right field service technicians, coordinating with them for availability, managing work order changes, assigning jobs, and ensuring it is successfully delivered.
That’s a lot of work – and hence, doing it manually leads to errors, confused workers, and dissatisfied customers.
Read more to understand how digitizing scheduling via field service management software helps streamline operations.
Challenges in scheduling and dispatching field services
Here are five key challenges faced by field service businesses arising from improper scheduling
- Availability of workers: since field services are remote jobs, knowing the exact location of field service technicians is difficult unless they are in a good network area. Not knowing their work status hampers the assignment of available jobs on time.
- Routes for job sites: in today’s traffic and weather conditions, it is not wise to rely solely on intuition to reach a job site. Workers may also waste time, and without GPS there’s no way to know their status on the road.
- Frequent job changes: customers may want to reschedule appointments or change job details. Some workers may face a change of scope of work on reaching the job site. Such unexpected changes make it difficult to keep track and increase the workload on field service technicians.
- Workload balance: training workers on time is essential to make the job ready. Assigning workers the right jobs based on their availability becomes a challenge if regular ones take holidays or fall sick. Balancing workload is essential for field service technician retention.
- Minimizing delays: no one likes to wait – and some field service jobs tend to be ‘emergency situations’. Delaying service can cause frustration in customers and may not come back.
What is a field service scheduling and dispatching software?
A field service scheduling and dispatching software facilitates various operations involved in assigning jobs to field service technicians and ensuring job completion.
It primarily helps you prioritize jobs, assign the right jobs to the right field service technicians, and gain visibility in field service execution.
How field service management software helps overcome scheduling challenges
Automation helps your team avoid manual tasks so that they can focus on providing good customer service and ensure successful delivery. Here’s how field service management software enables this:
Automated scheduling and dispatching
The field service management app makes it possible to completely automate scheduling tasks. It will capture data from customers about job details and analyze the requirements. It will check available technicians based on skills, proximity to the job site, feedback from previous customers, etc., and assign relevant ones for the job.
The FSM app does everything without manual intervention and will share alerts on any issues.
Better visibility on scheduling operations
Managing job assignments can distract employees from the urgent tasks at hand. A field service management software helps prioritize tasks based on urgency and packages chosen by customers. It also provides a dashboard to visualize tasks and resource allocation for teams to handle any flagged cases.
Instant and real-time communication
Field service management apps include real-time communication features that help you stay in touch with assigned field service workers on the job. Technicians can update their timesheets, ask for a supervisor’s help, or share information about job sites with managers. For any changes in job details, the workers will get instantly informed via notifications on the mobile FSM app.
Resource allocation
Field service management software will understand job requirements, and field service technician availability, and assign resources like equipment or materials accordingly. It will inform you if equipment is in service, or if a material is not available enough to do the job. It also automatically stocks inventory based on service demand and historical data.
Handling customers effectively
Field service management apps will share real-time updates with your customers about job scheduling and dispatching. This reduces support ticket requests as customers get notified immediately when there is any progress. FSM software also saves customer data to run reward campaigns or generate reports for understanding service markets.
Experience seamless scheduling and dispatching today
At Zuper, our field service management software solutions come with comprehensive scheduling and intelligent dispatching automation workflows. Enabled by Artificial Intelligence, we eliminate the stress of making errors in your most important operation – book a demo to know more.
