Ways to Optimize Efficiency in the Field Service Industry

Maximizing efficiency and productivity in your field service business is a continual process that can provide significant benefits to your team’s morale and your bottom line.

 Less Travel Time With Better Routing

A great area of your business that can maximize your team’s time is by scheduling crews to work on jobs that are close to one another. By reducing the amount of time your crew spends on the road, the more time you can allocate to getting more jobs done in a timely fashion.

Scheduling efficiently can also be made easier by using software that allows real-time scheduling updates, cutting down on the need to communicate schedule changes and tracking down the next job’s schedule. Not only does this allow more time for team members to do their daily responsibilities, but it will lead to better customer experiences as well as a result of less scheduling confusion.

 Better Estimate Materials Needed

Are you still spending countless hours with paper-based estimates and job sketches? Trade in the paper and pen for an automated field service software that allows for both consistency and customization where you need it at the click of a button.

With the right CRM software, estimates can also include the opportunity to easily upsell your value-added services to offer customers additional opportunities to use you for all their landscaping needs. The right software will also be highly scalable, so your new efficient processes can grow with you and continue to maximize your resources.

Automating all billing and reporting also helps when it comes to your annual internal audit, providing an accurate and up-to-date dashboard of data to help you evaluate the efficacy of your business.

Customer Service and Administrative Assistance

Customer service is integral to the success of your business. But with many customer service opportunities comes a need for time spent on customer service. By finding a designated employee to provide a high level of detail-oriented customer care, you can redirect your team member’s energy to mission-critical tasks.

Hiring a secretary or remote virtual assistant can help your work orders to become more detailed and focused on customer needs. As well, customer satisfaction increases with the amount of quality service received, resulting in return customers and positive word of mouth.

As an additional tip, it is worth finding an employee that is highly trained to upsell your services to prospective and existing customers in order to maximize as much as possible on every job - achieving the “quality over quantity” principle.

Better Communication Inside and Outside Your Business

Communication is key to a streamlined workflow. Therefore, it’s important to find opportunities for improvement in the way that your team communicates with others inside the business and to external stakeholders, including customers and suppliers. Under the umbrella of communication, there are some categories that are the best places to start in streamlining your communication: work orders and job details, scheduling, and customer service areas.

Work Orders And Contract Details

Mobile-friendly software offers more opportunity for on-the-go crew members to check in on their work order and job details, and even complete the job administration on the go, allowing billing to occur faster and improving your company’s cash flow.

By using a mobile-friendly, work orders can be accessed anywhere from your crew’s mobile devices. Not only does this allow you to communicate information and updates remotely, but digital work orders can’t be lost while out on the field. Detailed work orders also reduce the amount of time spent communication back and forth on job specifics and clarification.

Real-Time Scheduling

The advanced scheduling features offered through the Arborgold business management software allow you to efficiently schedule your team in advance and in real-time, communicating updates to personnel as you go.

Customer Relationship Management

Efficiency also occurs when jobs are done correctly and to the satisfaction of your customers. With the help of a customer relationship management software, you’re able to effectively communicate with your customers to determine the details of their needs, as well as ask for feedback after the end of the job to preserve the relationship and help you improve your services for the future.

Improve Your Invoicing Processes

Technology has allowed business today to experience fast and efficient billing setup for your customers. This particular aspect of a field service software can include flexible service scheduling and billing features that cut down on the time spent coordinating your team based on jobs and needless administrative work.

Reducing overhead costs by reducing the need for more time spent on invoicing and following up with payments. Additionally, a highly intuitive field service software can allow for quick service inputs and updates, so you can complete jobs on the go and invoice customers immediately after the work in completed.

 Automation is the Key to Efficiency

While there are countless facets for your business that can be improved upon for better efficiency, it’s always valuable to evaluate your traditional process with a new automation-focused perspective. By centralizing as many functions of your business as possible, you can eliminate wasted time and brainpower on your daily tasks, allowing more opportunities for growth.

Arborgold’s integrated business management system offers a wide suite of features that directly benefit the functions and productivity within your business:

●      Advanced scheduling features allow you to efficiently schedule your team and communicate changes quickly.

●      Time tracking gives you an in-depth look into the time spent on individual jobs and tasks so you can evaluate where inefficiencies and improper quoting occurs.

●      Detailed work orders provide your team with all the information needed to execute the job, cutting down on time spent communicating questions and answers.

●      Mobile-friendly software allows a collaborative platform for your on-the-go team members, allowing your team to complete service administration on the job, which in turn helps expedite the end of job invoicing.

Maximizing efficiency in the field service industry is a continual process but becomes easier as you put more effective and collaborative systems in place to enhance productivity. Begin your journey towards becoming a highly efficient field service business with the help of Arborgold’s full-service Customer Relationship Management software.