Providing high quality but still profitable customer service is becoming a challenge as vehicle maintenance, fuel, inventory, and other costs associated with running a business rise. To help alleviate this problem, consider working harder to keep your field service workers not just busy but productive to offer the best customer service available in your field. This is important because retaining your customer base requires that your customer service fees remain competitive – even during this difficult economic time.
Use these tips to improve technician utilization and increase the profitability of your field service:
Give Technicians Access To On-Demand Information
If your technicians have information about a customer’s service history before they arrive at the service site, they’ll be able to diagnose issues in less time, saving both you and the customer money and time. Having information about previous field service calls and customer service requests will allow technicians to be prepared with the tools/equipment they need, also before they arrive at a site. This foreknowledge speeds up task completion times, increases technician productivity during a field service visit, and allows technicians to make more service calls in a day.
Your field service technicians should also be able to tap into corporate knowledge resources available for their specific field service task. This might include repair videos, guides, instruction manuals, and the like. Because some service calls may be particularly challenging, your technicians should also have access to other technicians who may be able to help them with their problem. Having such access to on-demand information will reduce the probability of having to re-visit a customer site for the same issue.
Take the Time to Plan and Schedule Technician Dispatches
First, consider that field service visits should be done by the most qualified technician – they’ll spend less time diagnosing an issue and will have the skills necessary to resolve the issue more quickly.
That being said, availability should also be taken into account. The goal is to resolve the customer’s problem in the least amount of time. If your expert is tied up with another job or is in a geographically distant area, then it’s a better decision to send in the more available but more junior technician. He may take twice as long to resolve the issue, but if the total time taken is less than waiting for the expert, the customer will be happier and you will have saved both time and money.
That means that if you have multiple technicians going out into the field, don’t send one technician to 121 Main Street and a different technician to 122 Main Street. When looking at the list of necessary services calls in a day, try to ensure that only one technician is going to each area and that there aren’t any overlaps. Also try to ensure that each technician remains in a relative dense geographical area, or you’re losing time to long commutes.
To make your field customer service more profitable and competitive, contact us for more details or click to learn about Technisoft Service Management for Sage 300 ERP.
