Overcoming Field Service Management Challenges in service businesses: Facing these 7 main challenges head on

Service-based businesses, regardless of industry, provide specific services to customers to help fulfill a need. Most service businesses have several field service technicians who perform jobs such as installations and maintenance in the field. Some examples include HVAC professionals, telecom providers, electricians, and plumbers, among many others.

To be successful, organizations with field service technicians at different, sometimes remote locations, require field technician management software to help manage work orders received, gain visibility into their field activities, automate information, field service route optimization, and keep costs down.

From intelligent field service scheduling to integrations with third-party information systems, field service management software can provide you with the right field service management tools to reach the ultimate goal of service excellence.

We’ve compiled the 7 main field service management challenges a field service business must overcome.

What Happens If You Don’t Overcome Field Service Management Challenges?

Before learning about the field service management challenges, let’s consider what the service business will be. Such issues can impact customer satisfaction, business effectiveness, technician performance, and profitability.

1. Decline in Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is one of the most critical success factors in any service-oriented organization. If field service management challenges are unmet, customers are left waiting for services, receiving wrong information, and having unsolved problems. These problems will likely make customers lose patience and be dissatisfied with your service. A HubSpot study found that after more than one bad experience, around 73% of consumers say they would do business with a competitor instead.

Customer dissatisfaction will not only result in customer attrition but also lead to negative word of mouth and online reviews, which are detrimental to the brand image. This can lead to fewer new clients and little revenue in the long run. Lastly, failure to deliver quality services or products to the customers’ expectations places your business in a disadvantageous position in the market.

2. Increased Operational Costs

Resource issues can become a significant problem in field service management. If these challenges are not addressed, operational costs become extremely high. For example, ineffective planning or the absence of proper field service routing can result in increased time and fuel costs. Field technicians may also spend most of their time traveling instead of performing service tasks, lowering the efficiency of your workers.

Also, companies that have not adopted FSM technology will experience additional expenses in terms of administrative blunders, slow data entry, and poor interactivity. Not being able to adapt to digital change means that time is lost and costs are incurred, which is detrimental to your bottom line.

3. Lower Technician Productivity

Field technicians are one of the most critical factors in any service industry. However, their field service productivity can be an issue when you do not apply FSM solutions. This means technicians may need real-time information about their jobs, leading to confusion and time wastage.

happen if we don’t overcome them.

Not paying attention to the challenges in field service management can severely affect your business. Furthermore, due to a lack of access to customer history or detailed information about the job, the technicians may arrive at the site ill-equipped and take longer to resolve the issue.

Lacking communication tools like a field technician mobile app, technicians must spend extra time communicating with dispatchers or entering data into legacy systems. This leads to frustration and low morale, further decreasing productivity and increasing employee turnover.

4. Missed Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are formal agreements that define the quality and time frame of job delivery. Failure to meet the SLAs can result in fines, penalties, or even loss of business from key clients.

Delays in service delivery negatively affect customers’ trust in your company. SLA breaches may cause customers to not return as frequently or for the long term and getting them to agree to the contract terms may be more challenging.

Ensuring the company meets the set SLAs is only possible if dispatchers and field technicians are well coordinated. Without monitoring the operations of field technicians in real time, it is challenging to assign the right technician to a particular job. This results in delayed delivery and unsatisfied clients.

5. Increased Service Delays and Repeat Visits

If issues in field service management are not addressed, services take longer to be delivered, and repeated visits occur. Contractors may go to a site without the tools, spare parts, or information required to do the job in the first place. This has led to several visits to address a particular concern, which increases operating expenses and the time taken to meet customers’ requirements.

For instance, the absence of real-time inventory control implies that the correct parts are unavailable when required, creating more hold-ups. Each repeat visit reduces the overall productivity and makes the business more vulnerable to competitors’ attacks.

6. Lack of Data-Driven Decision Making

In today’s world, where data is a crucial asset, companies that do not harness field service management data are disadvantaged. Lack of information on technician performance, customer satisfaction, and organizational productivity makes decision-making difficult.

You may fail to seize opportunities to improve processes, train technicians, or shorten service delivery time. This is because your business cannot grow based on the insights and performance indicators available in real time.

The Case for Field Technician Management Software

Service-based businesses, regardless of industry, provide specific services to help fulfill a need. Most have several field service technicians who perform installations and maintenance. Some examples include HVAC professionals, telecom providers, electricians, and plumbers, among many others.

To be successful, organizations with field service technicians at remote locations require field technician management software to help manage work orders received, gain visibility into their field activities, automate information and field service route optimization, to keep costs down.

From intelligent field service scheduling to integrations with third-party information systems, field service management software can provide you with the right field service management tools to reach the ultimate goal of service excellence.

We’ve compiled the seven central field service management challenges a field service business must overcome.

Seven Central Field Service Management Challenges

1. Improving customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is the ultimate end goal for any service company in any industry. Whether it is the time required to solve a customer problem or the actual quality of the service provided, field activities are often measured in terms of customer satisfaction.

This metric is significant for a growing service business because bad customer service results in fewer clients and less revenue at the end of the day. Hubspot conducted a study on customer satisfaction, revealing how 80% of survey respondents admit to switching companies after a bad experience.

A Forbes article describes the impact of poor customer service and how brands have lost billions of dollars. It further explains that if a business “isn’t already customer-focused, it’s time.”

TECHNOLOGY IS BOTH A CHALLENGE AND A SOLUTION; IN FACT

Living in a tech-driven world has increased customer expectations. People know what’s possible and they expect near flawless service quality every single time. While customer service technology raises expectations, it can also help field service providers meet them. For example, service businesses can use field service management apps to improve their internal processes and workflows to be able to offer faster, more effective, and personalized experiences than paper-based systems.

However, the only way to ensure that the quality of service is improving is by measuring the outcomes.

Previously, customers would complete a paper-based survey with their feedback when it was time to renew their contract. Today, field service management software enables customers to provide input in real-time so that quality can be improved immediately.

2. Transitioning to 100% paperless processes

The ability to centralize information to free up more time and increase field service productivity is only truly possible through field service digital transformation. Paper processes are slow, expensive, and error-prone. When you digitize your workflows – from initial service requests to signed work order reports – information exchange is smoother and faster.

REAL-WORLD USE CASE

Boardwalk, a Canadian company and field service team providing residential rental apartments across several provinces with 200 field technicians, significantly improved their relationships with contractors after going digital. Before implementing Praxedo, they were using the old way of field service scheduling, allocating their technicians into a time slot on Excel spreadsheets, with no visibility into which resource was available and when. Suddenly, they had “a comprehensive view of technicians’ schedules across all offices” with Praxedo’s field service management solution. Praxedo’s advanced field service scheduling functionality simplified the process for field service dispatchers at the main office.

3. Intelligent scheduling

Nothing wastes more precious time than inefficient field service scheduling. On the contrary, having real-time insight into the location, availability, and skills of your mobile teams allows you to increase response times and better accommodate urgent requests, as well as avoid field service scheduling conflicts. It’s expected in today’s field service industry!

Optimized field service scheduling and field service route optimization help you get a better handle on your field service operations. As a field service company, you want to keep distances between job sites as short as possible for your technicians to save time. Your field service dispatcher needs activity tracking capabilities to view the work order status of each resource.

You want a visual representation of everything that is happening in the field, on a map. Praxedo’s field service scheduling software offers greater work order management flexibility, for more visibility, simplified tasks, real-time updates, and ultimately, happier customers.

MORE ENGAGED TECHNICIANS

Optimized schedules also help field service technicians feel more motivated and valued, improving their willingness to act as brand ambassadors for your company. All the information they need to work autonomously is available in their field technician mobile app. With geolocation capabilities, they’re also spending less time getting from point A to point B. Employee engagement is one of the biggest field service management challenges these days.

4. First-time fix rate

The first-time fix rate (FTFR) is an important indicator for measuring service quality. Having a good FTFR means your field service technician succeeded in solving a customer’s problem on their first visit.

Your first-time fix rate directly affects how customers feel about your company and the service they’re getting. Customers are legitimately frustrated when their issue cannot be resolved on the first visit due to a lack of expertise or spare parts. Customer satisfaction becomes much easier with the spare parts inventory management feature of field service management software like Praxedo.

RAPID ISSUE RESOLUTION IS A WIN-WIN FOR EVERYONE

When the issue can’t be resolved on the first visit, customers have to wait, hoping the next visit will result in a fix.

If it’s a piece of equipment that needs fixing, failure to resolve the issue may cause financial losses for the customer. Moreover, your service business will likely experience a financial loss due to additional field service scheduling requirements, higher fuel costs, possible late penalties, and lower customer satisfaction.

Field service management software can improve the first-time fix rate by addressing the root cause of these delays. Intelligent field service scheduling capabilities ensure that a technician with the right skillset is sent to each job, with the right spare parts, in a timely manner, increasing the chance of a successful visit.

5. Meeting Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

SLAs are contracts that guarantee a certain level of service performance for the customer. For example, a customer may want to ensure that a job is completed within a 2-hour timeframe. With the best field service management software like Praxedo, contracts can be created and associated with a given work order.

MONITORING KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPIS)

Being able to view field service KPIs gives you real-time insight into some of the areas you might want to improve on, including:

• The number of work orders that were executed, on what day, and at what time
• The number of work orders that met the required deadlines described in the SLAs
• Work order duration for a particular customer compared to the average duration

DATA-DRIVEN DECISIONS ARE HIGHLY ENCOURAGED

Analyzing historical data allows service businesses to make more informed business decisions. With field service software, you have full insight into field service operations in one view. You can structure your operations workflows how you want so that you always have the information you’re looking for accessible whenever you need it.

The right data insights ensure you take the actions required to maintain a certain quality of service.

6. Learning how to cut costs and invoice sooner

Technicians can use their mobile devices equipped with a user-friendly field technician mobile app to record service times, travel times, and break times. They can quickly complete work order reports at the customer site with easy-to-use electronic forms that offer drop-down menus, check boxes, support photos, and electronic signatures. These important mobile capabilities allow service providers to cut down on travel costs, and use less paper.

SAME-DAY INVOICING BECOMES POSSIBLE

When your field service management software is integrated with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) or accounting system, invoices can be automatically created in real-time based on the information that was captured in the field.

Leading HVAC company in the Toronto and surrounding area, Vari-Therm Ltd, now sends out invoices the same day, whereas, before Praxedo, they waited until the following Thursday to bill clients for the work that was done 2 weeks prior. Getting paid faster allows them to better track their cash flow and eliminate any gaps.

7. Easy integration with enterprise systems

Another one of the many field service management challenges is potential typing errors when completing electronic forms. To help reduce these errors, some fields can be pre-populated with data from the enterprise information system. But integration does not have to stop there. A best-of-breed field service management solution can also interoperate with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer management system (CRM) software using application programming interfaces (APIs) and web services.