Workforce Management Featured Article
Replace Field Service WFM with Newer, Mobile-Focused Solutions
There are few organizations that rely on their workforce management solutions more than companies with field service personnel: think telephone and telecom service providers, appliance repair, delivery companies and builders and contractors. For these businesses, a mobile workforce management solution can ensure that field service personnel are making the best use of their time, following the most logical route and prioritizing customers who need more attention.
In a recent blog post, the company Verisae said that by replacing their old workforce management solutions with a new performance management framework, companies are better positioned to measure, analyze and make decisions about the performance of their workforce and their service organization.
“Ongoing monitoring and analysis of a service organization’s most significant key performance indicators (KPIs) can guide meaningful business decisions that lead to continuous improvement,” according to the Verisae blog. “To align the mobile workforce management process with business goals, service organizations must measure their performance and develop various corrective actions.”
Most field service organizations could stand to improve their operations today. By collecting data in the field as the work is completed, companies can get access to more immediate data and use it to improve the schedule. This allows them to better meet customer expectations, react in real time and provide better service.
“Field mobility can help service organizations improve operational effectiveness by aligning the service organization around the plan, focusing field technicians on the plan, handling changes proactively, and managing exceptions in real time,” according to Verisae. “With field mobility, you can change the way field technicians work. Improving their mobile user experience allows them to be more focused and effective.”
Static workforce management solutions simply aren’t enough: no field service calls are ever predictable, and it’s important that companies choose a solution that manage exceptions and be flexible to the needs of traveling personnel. Chances are good that by the end of the day, the schedule will bear little resemblance to what it looked like in the morning before work began.
“Moreover, if your mobile workforce management solution combines sophisticated backend services to look for exceptions and can solve them automatically or provide the context to solve them, you can improve your entire dispatch operation,” wrote the Verisae blogger. “Because at any time throughout the day you can provide your field technicians with an optimal plan that best reflects your business goals.”
A flexible solution provides more visibility into the field service business process by actively monitoring and updating business processes and workflows to meet requirements that may change over time. Utilizing a BPM tool to abstract the business processes and workflow from the mobile workforce management software allows more control over monitoring, updating and deploying business processes.
While the goal is ultimately to make better use of field service personnel’s time, a great secondary goal includes improved customer satisfaction: by predicting more accurate times for house calls, companies can avoid the “sometime between noon and 6:00 pm” windows that customers hate so much. Even with schedule exceptions, the service organization can get back on track and ensure that customers aren’t left behind.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi
