Whether you run HVAC, plumbing, furniture delivery, or gardening – every field service business faces scale-up challenges. For such businesses that involve multiple scheduling, travel, inventory, and remote surveillance tasks – manual operations will only lead to human errors, delays, and poor service delivery.
Field service management software helps overcome operations and business scale-up challenges. With so many FSM software vendors, it may get difficult to choose – here’s a guide to help select the right fit for your business needs.
What is a field service management software?
Field service management software is a specialized tool to streamline field service operations via automation and software enablement. This means – you can digitize your manual tasks so that your field service teams and technicians can focus on important tasks that help deliver exceptional customer service.
For example – FSM software helps track inventory levels versus demand for services to help maintain the same. Using predictive analytics, it is possible to align equipment maintenance schedules to improve its usage time.
It is possible to experience the benefits of FSM software across marketing, customer service, data analytics, scheduling, dispatching workers, and more – provided you have the necessary features.
Top three features your FSM software should have:
- Automated scheduling and dispatching: helps automatically assign jobs to field service technicians based on their skills, proximity to the job site, availability, past job completion success rates, and more parameters. This feature significantly reduces human errors and enhances first-time fix rates
- Mobile app access: FSM software offering iOS or Android mobile app facilitates real-time communication, leverages GPS for location tracking, enables instant messaging, and other supporting functionalities like timesheet management or instant document access
- Customizable workflows: Flexibility is key. FSM software should allow businesses to tailor workflows, forms, and checklists according to specific services or customer requirements. This customization ensures adherence to standard operating procedures defined by your company and improves adoption rates among workers. They should also include integration support with existing or new software
These three features form the crux of automating a majority of field service operations to improve productivity and business visibility.
How to align business needs for choosing the field service management software provider?
Here’s a four-step process to help you find the right fit for your field service management software:
Step 1: Document your standard operating procedures and key metrics
By documenting and creating a knowledge base of your field service businesses’ standard operating processes, you perform the first level of optimization on paper. This helps you identify irregularities and irrelevant tasks. Identify key areas that require improvement and automation. Also, design key metrics you will track for the changed processes to calculate the ROI of FSM software.
Step 2: Finalize on essential and ‘good to have’ FSM features
Based on your documented workflows – identify FSM software features that are required for the removal of manual tasks and the latest technology trends that would help upgrade your processes. Then make a list of potential FSM software from SaaS directories and filter them based on your features list. Perform secondary research by comparing their pricing plans, free trial offers, customer reviews, social media activity, etc.
Step 3: Analyze costs and budget by negotiating with the vendor sales team
Once you’ve created a final list of vendor candidates, speak with their sales team or management for enterprise edition discounts and demos. Based on that, determine your budget and keep negotiating till you find a vendor who fits both your business automation requirements and budget.
Step 4: Check for scalability and customer support
A key challenge in adopting field service management software is how it is not a smooth onboarding for field service technicians. If your vendor has poor user experience and complicated workflows – it may hamper your adoption and waste productivity for workers.
Ensure your FSM software vendor provides sufficient onboarding support via demos and training sessions. Also, check with their sales team on how scalable their software is and up to date with the latest technology and market trends.
Featured image credit: Freepik.
