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Why Workforce Scheduling is the Secret to Success

Why Workforce Scheduling is the Secret to Success

Workforce scheduling is crucial to efficient business operations. While it is inevitable that last-minute changes such as delays and cancellations will occur when managing a workforce, these changes should never impact the quality of your services, the productivity and punctuality of your technicians or the outcome of your customer experience.

Workforce scheduling is a complex task prone to human error and the risks run high. Poorly implemented scheduling can result in missed appointments, reduced productivity, wasted time and money and can burden your business with a bad reputation. However, these negative outcomes should be a thing of the past given the innovative scheduling software that is available to the market.

Leveraging Workforce Scheduling Software

AI-driven workforce scheduling automation improves technician productivity up to 68% more than manual or rule-based solutions and cuts schedule costs by 15%. In addition to increasing the productivity and efficiency of a mobile workforce, workforce scheduling software improves the customer experience through higher schedule adherence and can increase first-time fix rates by up to 40%.

Customer experience is an essential part of business success in 2020. Ensuring positive customer experiences can be the difference between your success and your competitors. In fact, 60% of organizations state that customer service is the top source of competitive differentiation.

Intelligent workforce scheduling optimizes your customer experience, sets you apart from the competition and secures your success in the marketplace. The secret to this success is simple - leveraging workforce scheduling software with these three attributes:

1. Optimizing Costs with AI-Driven Smart Scheduling

Smart scheduling runs on a personalized framework established by your business, based on your specific KPIs, configurable workforce and schedule cost parameters. Inputting your Field Resource Units (FRU), you can build out geographies, teams, and many more groupings to meet your needs. Scheduling with accurate knowledge of your required and available inventory and your technician’s skills, certifications and availability within a unified dashboard guarantees that the most qualified technician will arrive prepared with the right tools and parts.

The AI-driven scheduling algorithms use real-time data to assess incoming jobs in order to optimize your schedule in the most efficient way. This allows for flexibility within your established parameters, and solves for updates, changes and bookings. By eliminating costly errors, optimizing technician productivity and dynamically managing changing demand, smart scheduling provides tangible results to your business operations. For instance, a leading global appliance company, saved $1M YoY and reduced technician travel times by 15% by implementing Smart Scheduling.

2. Increasing Visibility with Integrated Mapping

Increasing visibility into field operations is critical to making informed business decisions that save you time and money and delight your customers. By using integrated mapping, you are able to view the real-time locations of your technicians, their active routes and track job sites and warehouse locations. This map view provides status updates for each contractor and ensures timeliness with traffic-enabled real-time route optimization thanks to GPS integration. The dynamic interface allows you to reconfigure your routes and schedules flexibly with job prioritization, customer availability and weighted territories, and the collaborative dashboard improves the customer experience with real-time communication between customers and technicians.

Delivering exceptional customer experiences is essential to the modern field service industry. By implementing workforce scheduling, one of Europe’s largest manufacturers, Baxi, increased customer satisfaction rates by 10%, increased service calls completed per day by 30% and reduced travel costs by 15%.

3. Improving Data Reliability with Real-Time Reporting

Operations planning in the 21st century must be backed by reliable data. With configurable dashboard reporting and enterprise-wide visibility, workforce management software gives you access to the data you need to optimize your service operations with confidence. Web and mobile applications are securely enabled for global access so that your entire team can be armed with the information they need to succeed. According to a survey of more than 1,000 senior executives conducted by PwC, highly data-driven organizations are three times more likely to report significant improvements in decision-making compared to those who rely less on data.

By ensuring that your workforce scheduling runs smoothly, you are setting up your business for success. Choosing workforce management software equipped with smart scheduling, integrated mapping and real-time reporting is the best way to secure that success. Your business can confidently cut costs and claim an exceptional customer experience knowing that the best technician, with the right parts and information, at the least cost, will be dispatched for each job within the least amount of time.

ServicePower’s intelligent service scheduling solution can ensure your success with smart scheduling, integrated mapping and real-time reporting. See your scheduling optimizations in action and request a demo today.

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