How Field Service Automation Improves Customer Ratings & Profits

Customers can rate your business with a tap of their finger, directly impacting your profits. There’s no escaping the fact that your online reputation can be your strongest asset or your biggest liability. Read on to discover how field service automation can help you exceed your customers’ expectations. 

The Importance of Customer Ratings in Field Service Automation 

Today’s customers are savvy, short on time, and spoiled for choice. They rely on online feedback to make a swift decision about whether to do business with you or move on to your competitors. 

The statistics are hard to ignore:

• Displaying reviews boosts conversion by 270%.
• A surprising 96% of customers specifically look for negative reviews.
• Negative reviews cause 17 in 20 buyers to hesitate about dealing with a company.

The takeaway is that every field service appointment should be focused on boosting positive reviews to raise your reputation. The most effective way to achieve this is by delivering a seamless experience perfectly adapted to your customers' needs.

The Common Challenges of Manual Field Service Operations

Field service customers prioritize high-quality communication, convenience, and effective fixes. However, many organizations struggle to live up to customer expectations because they continue to use outdated workforce management solutions.

Let’s look at some of the challenges a traditional approach to field service operations creates in more detail.

Multiple Legacy Systems
Managing operations through multiple legacy systems is confusing, laborious, and inefficient. It can cause issues such as crossed wires between customers, dispatch, and technicians, slow response times, customer cancellations, or incorrect parts.

Lack of Quantifiability
Many field service organizations lack a system for converting customer data into measurable KPIs, making it challenging to establish benchmarks that accurately measure indicators like productivity and customer satisfaction. 

Poor Visibility
Traditional field service solutions offer a limited view into a customer’s service history, leaving technicians to educate themselves on-site, relearning the same lessons as previous technicians, and resulting in low success rates.

Inefficient Scheduling
Technicians may arrive late due to traveling long distances or inefficient routing and scheduling, despite the availability of nearby technicians.

Using ineffective field service solutions leads to poor performance, low first-time fix rates, and negative customer ratings, which can stall company growth.

To improve your metrics, online reputation, and bottom line, you should start by identifying your current pain points and which of your processes and operations need to be automated. Armed with this information, you will be better positioned to select the right field service management software for your needs.

Siemens uses ServicePower’s automated field service solution to manage 400,000 jobs annually. The technology giant has improved customer satisfaction and loyalty, boosted employee productivity, and increased first-time fix rates, all while reducing travel costs and carbon emissions.

Benefits of Field Service Automation

You can use automation to directly improve profitability by saving time, optimizing operations, satisfying customers, and solving the various other pain points a field service organization can encounter.

Here’s a breakdown of how field service software is essential to delivering the best 360-degree customer experiences: 

Accelerates Service Delivery
Customers experiencing malfunctioning or offline equipment not only expect field services to be delivered on time, but they want a fix yesterday. However, the outdated manual-based approach to managing field service calls is slow, complex, and error-prone. On the other hand, minimizing Mean Time to Service (MMTS) and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) is one of automated field service management’s stand-out features.

Automated field service software lets you cut MMTS and MTTR by:

• Optimizing your routing and scheduling in real-time with geolocation and AI-driven scheduling software that can assign the closest most qualified technician, efficiently route journeys, and ensure prompt arrival.
• Streamlining communications between field technicians and the warehouse and giving visibility into available inventory.
• Enabling Augmented Reality (AR) technology to help interactively support technicians dealing with unfamiliar systems or issues.

Electrolux used field service scheduling automation to achieve a 15% reduction in technician travel times and save $1M annually.

Improves First-Time Fix Rate
Increasing the frequency with which your field technicians can fix service issues during the first call-out is a surefire way to please your customers and avoid the extra expense of multiple appointments.

Automated field service software enables real-time access to product specifications, service details, work orders, customer case histories, and inventory, empowering technicians to quickly diagnose issues, source appropriate parts, and intelligently triage and schedule calls from the get-go. This lets both employed and contracted technicians arrive on-site armed with the information and parts they need to get the job done for a first-time fix, raising both your customer ratings and your bottom line. 

Meets Customer Expectations
Customers are used to enjoying the benefits of user-friendly advanced technology in their everyday lives. They expect rapid communication, self-service portals, and ETA tracking, so your organization should provide a similar experience.

Automating tasks such as scheduling, routing, and locating technicians, along with prioritizing clear and consistent real-time communication, boosts satisfaction. Customers appreciate a field service company that evolves with modern technology, and organizations report a 39% improvement in customer satisfaction rates after deploying field service management software. 

Thanks to Service Power's automated field software, Baxi increased customer satisfaction rates by 10% and the number of service calls completed per day by 30%.

Key Features of the Most Effective Field Service Automation Software

The best available field service workforce management solutions go beyond the basic functionalities of scheduling and dispatching technicians. To streamline your operations and maximize your ROI, select a field service app that uses AI and predictive analytics to proactively anticipate what your customers need.

You should consider solutions that offer the following features to exceed the expectations of both customers and technicians.

AI-Driven Business Intelligence

AI-driven field service software lets your organization quickly process vast amounts of data and extract useful patterns. Dashboards, alerts, and KPI insights allow technicians to turn data into real-world intelligence for better decision-making and predict periods of high demand or anticipate problems and schedule preemptive maintenance. AI also allows the automation of repetitive tasks, reduces redundancies, increases accuracy, and simplifies complex workflows enhancing agility, speed, and efficiency.

Schedule Optimization

Scheduling and dispatching technicians at customer-friendly times is challenging. Field service automation apps use AI and GPS data to automatically optimize complex scheduling and routing. They evaluate various factors like inventory, skills, location, and costs in real-time to ensure the appropriate technicians equipped with the necessary skills and parts are dispatched promptly, improving MMTS and reducing travel time for technicians.

Mobility

To satisfy your customers, your technicians should be able to deliver field services and communicate anywhere, anytime. A mobile workforce management solution maximizes productivity during and between jobs. The best field service apps also allow pre-appointment customer assessments and a direct view into the customer's history and pain points, awareness of special instructions, and availability of parts for appliance repair.

Workforce Management

In today’s challenging recruitment landscape, employed technicians may not always be available where and when you need them. Therefore, maintaining a hybrid roster of employed and contracted technicians is necessary to meet mounting customer demand. First-rate field service automation software allows you to seamlessly deploy and manage your blended workforce from one platform.

Self-Service Customer Portal

A self-service customer portal can improve customer confidence by giving them real-time data regarding a field technician’s availability, ETA, and more. It also reduces inbound calls, expedites customer payments, and demonstrates a “customer first” approach.

Warranty Claims Management 

Another automation feature that gives customers what they want and improves ratings is warranty claims management. Your field service organization should be able to provide automatic claims submissions, real-time claims tracking, and real-time validation to increase visibility and reduce turnaround time.

Predictive Maintenance

One of the most effective ways field service automation software can help you exceed service users’ expectations and cut your costs is predictive maintenance. For example, field service apps for IoT-enabled smart homes identify and send alerts about pre-failure conditions, allowing you to provide a proactive service that impresses customers and saves you money over the long term. 

Top Tips for Implementing Field Service Automation

Selecting the field service app that best suits the needs of your business is the first essential step toward boosting your customer ratings and profits. However, to maximize the benefits of automation, it’s also important to ensure your workforce is well-prepared to take advantage of your upgraded capabilities. 

Here’s how to best approach change management within your field service company:

• Present the modernization effort in a collaborative way, explaining how it will help employees by eliminating repetitive tasks, shortening their journey times, and reducing repeat call-outs.
• Encourage feedback and use it to adapt and optimize your implementation approach.
• Ensure you provide employees with hands-on training and coaching to familiarize them with the new platform and its benefits.
• Allow employees time to adapt to both new processes and new technology.

Automate Your Field Service Operations With ServicePower

Discover how ServicePower can help your field service organization leverage the power of AI to modernize your operations and provide the excellent service your customers count on. Schedule a demo today to see how you can enjoy efficient problem-solving, improved customer service ratings, and increased profits.