If you’re in a field services business, then you likely already know how much coordination and planning it takes. Field service management covers every piece of the puzzle involved in delivering products or services to your customers. This may include managing the maintenance of equipment installed at customer sites. Or, it may involve managing other processes involved with field employees serving your clients. In the past, field service businesses relied on paper processes to coordinate. Then, field service management got a bit easier with the use of spreadsheets. But now, technology has advanced and software is available to optimize the experience even more.
What Does Field Service Management Software Do?
Field Service Management Software streamlines all of your field service operations into a single platform. That means you get to consolidate every paper file, spreadsheet, whiteboard, or calendar into an easy-to-use digital platform. Redlist’s Field Services software is a cloud-based mobile app. This makes all of your field services information accessible to you and your team whether you’re in the office or in the field.
The Key Field Service Management Software Features:
- Client Management – Online job requests, sales, estimates, and opportunity tracking.
- Resource Management – Scheduling and dispatch of your tools, equipment, and people with a simple visual calendar.
- Project Management – Track all of your service tickets and jobs to ensure you never miss a line item.
- Revenue Management – A digital service ticket process shortens the billing cycle and eliminates errors.
- Communication Management – You can automatically send schedule changes, saving time on manually notifying employees.
- Workforce and User Management – Field employees can easily track their time per service ticket or project, simplifying the payroll process.
- Automation and Integration – Configure the software to automate certain workflows or alerts. Also, you can integrate with other systems you use, such as Quickbooks.
- Reporting – Auto-populated reports put your real-time data at your fingertips.
As you can see by the feature list, field service management software is far more robust in its offerings than paper or spreadsheets. Additionally, you can configure the software to your existing workflow. Implementing software doesn’t mean you have to create a whole new way of doing things. Instead, it simply replaces the inefficient parts of your process that are creating bottlenecks in your workflow. For example, do your field employees acquire several days’ worth of paper service tickets before they turn them in? That instantly puts your billing cycle behind and leads to a higher rate of missing or inaccurate line items.
The Benefits of Field Service Management Software
With all of the possible uses for field service management software, it has several benefits. When your field employees are serving multiple customers per day, the efficiency of your processes, information, and communication impacts customer service and revenue. So, one of the biggest benefits is the amount of money the software can save you.
Improves Customer Service
When every employee has access to the same customer and project information, everyone will be on the same page. This creates a unified experience for customers as they get the same answers from field employees as they do sales or accounting employees.
Streamlines Scheduling and Dispatch
Scheduling and dispatch by paper, calendars, or whiteboards can be very disorganized. Overlooking a simple detail such as a technician’s planned time off or a required asset having planned maintenance downtime can derail a project. With a visual digital calendar, you do not miss details and scheduling is easier.
Saves Time and Increases Productivity
There are many points in the field service management process where you may be wasting time. This may be the time it takes field technicians to fill out paper forms by hand or it may be the data entry to turn service tickets into invoices. With field service management software, your field employees can quickly fill out digital forms and submit them instantly. And, the service ticket data can be effortlessly transferred to an invoice. The eliminated duplicate data entry allows your team to put that saved time to work on other tasks, such as an invoicing or service ticket backlog.
Easier Reporting
When you implement field service management software, the days of tracking down information and manually compiling reports are behind you. Instead, your real-time data automatically populates a reporting dashboard with all of the metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) that you want. This includes washout percentage, financial utilization, company growth over time, planned vs. actual performance, available hours of service (HOS), CO2 emissions over time, profit and loss overview, opportunity win/loss rate, and an overkill report.
Increases Billing Accuracy
Field services directly affect your revenue. If there is a break in communication between your sales team, field technicians, and your accounting team, your customer invoices are likely to be leaving money on the table. Your sales team may have specific terms in the client agreement about line items. But, your field technicians aren’t focused on line items, they’re focused on doing the job. Then, your accounting department can only invoice based on what they’re given. Field service management software creates a centralized system for collaboration between all of these employees from quote to cash.
Field Service Management Software Case Study
A crane company with more than 100 field employees serving 50 different projects per day turned to Redlist to streamline its field services. They had the specific goal of improving their revenue management. The company had a backlog of service tickets, was wasting time on duplicate data entry, and slow processes made for slow invoicing. Before implementing our field service management software, their billing cycle regularly took 18 days to over a month. Simply streamlining their field services and revenue management resulted in an increase in annual revenue totaling $1,097,833.
Over $1 Million of Annual Revenue Recovered
This may not be the result for every company after using field service management software. But, this is where the recovered revenue came from for this Redlist user:
- $377,000 of secured lost invoicing (from the 2% of paper service tickets that get lost before making it back to the office)
- $45,833 of saved double data entry labor hours (from the 2,292 hours per year spent entering service tickets to invoices)
- $675,000 of eliminated missing line items (from shortening the billing cycle to ensure line items are complete and correct)
If you’re trying to identify inaccuracies or missing line items a month after a job is done, your employees are far less likely to remember those details. A faster billing cycle means you can ask field employees about line items the same day or at least the same week as a job. Additionally, calling a customer to explain added line items a month after their project typically results in a poor customer experience.
This is just one way that field service management software can save you money and increase your revenue. With the time it saves employees and improved efficiency, you may find that you can also take on more projects and grow your company even further. Redlist is trusted to manage over 10,000 jobs every day across all of our clients. Each of those clients experiences their own unique benefits from using our software.
Optimize Your Field Services with Redlist
While spreadsheets or paper may appear to be a less expensive way of managing, it will cost you more in the long run. In a perfect world, papers don’t get lost, and your data entry has no errors. In our client case study above, the 2% of paper service tickets that are lost before making it to the office cost them $377,00 per year. That alone is proof that paper-based processes are not cheaper than software. Inevitably, you end up losing money through billing errors, slow processes, customer service issues, and poor communication and collaboration. Furthermore, that’s just revenue from improving processes. There is an immeasurable benefit to improving your customer experience. It can increase repeat business from existing customers, as well as referrals.
In order for your company to remain competitive, you need field service management software. It helps you optimize your processes to keep your customer service at its best, while keeping your costs low and revenue high. This also empowers your business to face the ever-changing circumstances you deal with daily. From fluctuating gas prices to supply chain and labor shortage issues, you simply don’t have time for inefficiency. Field service management software enables you to schedule, dispatch, and manage every step of your customers, projects, and revenue in a more efficient way.
If you’d like to see how Redlist can accelerate the growth of your business, schedule a demo of our Field Service Management Software.
