One of the greatest challenges for field service managers and employees is keeping work compliant while also ensuring that it’s done quickly and accurately among dispersed teams. In any field service operation, employees spend most of their time away from the home office. Managers often have a difficult time with service assurance and ensuring strict field service compliance and oversight.
This has always been a unique challenge for field service companies, but today’s advanced collaborative field service management tools offer a viable solution.
Better Service Assurance With Collaboration Tools
One-quarter of all service calls require more than one visit to complete satisfactorily. Given the distributed nature of field service work, managers don’t necessarily know what’s going on at any given moment and can’t always communicate with workers in the field. This lack of control and the need for additional dispatches to customers’ locations are directly related to a lack of efficient collaboration tools.
This dynamic, in turn, defines the customer’s experience with field service companies. Just as managers can’t always stay in contact with workers, field service teams can’t always contact the customer or provide them with information quickly. Compliance and quality concerns aren’t caught until later, when customers call back and the team has to be dispatched again to complete the job correctly.
To change this dynamic, teams need better digital collaboration tools, which McKinsey reports can increase productivity by up to 30%. When field service teams, managers, and customers all collaborate in real time, the costs associated with repeated visits can be reduced by up to 40%. The key is combining communication and collaboration tools into a digital platform where every stakeholder can observe compliance in real time.
For example, on Coolfire’s platform, field service managers can create a shared collaboration space, or Session, for every service request, and make all information regarding the job available to everyone who needs it. Also, workers can keep managers and customers updated with photos and information as they complete the job to ensure field service compliance. A typical Session makes this possible in the following ways:
• Creating detailed workflows for teams
As managers create a Session, they can build specific tasks and dependencies into the work order with greater detail. Technicians know what tasks must be completed and in what order. They can easily reference the information in the Session while they’re in the field.
• Using data sharing as proof of compliance
Field service managers can invite both employees and customers into Sessions to provide and view updates in real time. Technicians can attach photos and videos of their work as the job progresses. They can also attach inspection forms for managers and customers.
• Archiving for future compliance audits
Coolfire’s Sessions don’t just create a space for field service collaboration; they also capture and store all the activity with relevant time and location stamping. If compliance concerns arise with any particular job, Sessions make it easy to clarify them.
Maintaining compliance and quality service assurance is difficult among a dispersed workforce. With digital collaboration software like Coolfire, however, field service companies have the opportunity to create a new system of communication and collaboration to overcome these challenges.
