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Scheduling service calls is an art as well as a science. More than anything, this part of managing a field service business tests your ability to anticipate problems, plan ahead, and make adjustments so that your team is operating at peak efficiency. But that isn’t easy, and you may be wondering what it takes to get to that point.
To do it right, you’re going to need employee schedule tools, the ability to track employee hours, and field service software that can automate a lot of these complex processes. These tools should also make it easier to evaluate work performance and make adjustments to improve the efficiency of your operation.
We've put together a handy list of scheduling tips to help you handle service scheduling in the future.
Scheduling your technicians is all about doing your homework. You probably have all the data you need to come up with an efficient scheduling plan, you just need to crunch the data and get the best software tools to manage things going forward. Here are six things you can do to improve your scheduling.
Before you can come up with a solid technician scheduling battle plan, you need to know what kind of resources it will take to run your operation effectively. Maybe you just need one full-time technician. Maybe you need a couple of full-time technicians, plus one part-time on-call technician who can pick up some of the slack.
It’s not easy having a totally optimized level of manpower in the field service business because demand can fluctuate constantly. However, here are a few things you can do to improve your efficiency.
Once you’ve figured out your general manpower requirements, it’s time to put together a plan that will make your business run like a well-oiled machine. Planning is tricky when it comes to field service, but it’s absolutely vital to running your organization effectively.
If you fail to put one together, you will have missed calls and customers who are unhappy and unlikely to do business with you again. Good management is essential to field service, and you can’t have good management without a good plan in place.
Planning is all about being proactive rather than reactive. A good plan will help you increase your efficiency and avoid situations where you’re managing by panic. Here are a few things to keep in mind when crafting your own plan.
Many field service company owners are tempted to save money on a dispatcher by either hiring an inexperienced person or simply doing the work themselves, but this is usually a mistake.
It's a bad idea to hire an inexperienced individual if you have a growing and complex operation that requires a lot of management skills. The dispatcher will soon become overwhelmed and you will pay the price in terms of getting through fewer jobs and dealing with unhappy customers.
It's also a bad idea to do it yourself because even if you are capable of it, you will find that your time is gobbled up by administrative tasks. As a result, you won't be able to put in the time necessary to grow your company. The relatively small amount of money you set aside for a dispatcher will be well worth it.
A dispatcher is essential to the smooth operation of your business. They are the thin line between order and chaos, so choose wisely.
A little preparation goes a long way, and that is doubly true when it comes to scheduling technicians. There are so many moving parts in a field service operation that it is vital that you prep for the upcoming day or week ahead of time, so make sure you’re setting aside some time to do that.
You should be looking for ways to plot out the most efficient way to sequence jobs and map them out over the course of the day, all the while keeping in contact with your customer so they know what to expect and aren’t left waiting for a technician who had too much work to get done that day.
With all the work you’ve done in the previous steps, it shouldn’t be too difficult to prepare properly in advance of each day. You just need to set aside the time to do it. Here are a couple of things you can do today to make sure tomorrow goes smoothly.
Field service can be a crazy world full of surprises, so you need to have a prioritization plan that will help you decide how to juggle jobs when surprises crop up.
If you get a request for an emergency HVAC repair and your technician has to drop everything, do you know how you will manage the rest of the jobs, and which ones may need to get bumped a day, even though the customer may not be happy about it?
Do you know what you’re going to tell the customer in the event that happens? If not, you need to come up with a process for handling these things.
It’s key to prioritize because you probably can’t answer all of the calls you get, even if you’re operating at peak efficiency. Here are a couple of tips to make prioritization easier.
When you’re scheduling technicians, it helps to know where everyone is at all times. Thanks to today’s technology, it’s easier than ever to monitor technician location. It lets you know who is available, who’s closest, and if they’ve made it to the customer yet.
Some software also lets the customer see where the technician is, so they have the peace of mind that someone is on the way, which improves customer satisfaction.
GPS is such an excellent tool for field service companies that weren’t available 10 years or so ago, at least not to the extent it is today. You should take advantage of this essential technology if you aren’t already.
A good field service management software solution is essential to being efficient when it comes to technician scheduling. Here are three of the best work order software options out there if you’re looking to improve how you do things.
Jobber gives field technician tools to stay on schedule via an excellent mobile app that focuses the user on the jobs scheduled for that day. You can also tap a button to clock in and out of a job. This streamlines and simplifies things for the technician so they can focus on the job at hand and move on to the next task quickly.
mHelpDesk does an excellent job with GPS tracking. It creates location-based reports and clocks technicians in and out with GPS coordinates so you have an audit trail of where they were and what they were doing. And this can all be done with smartphones that your technicians already have for maximum efficiency.
FieldEdge has a clear and simple dispatching board that gives your technicians a good overview of the upcoming schedule. And clicking on a work order shows which tech is closest to the job, a super-helpful feature that helps make this a top choice for scheduling.
You can also see where your technicians are on a handy map with icons.
As you can see, any effort to improve scheduling at your company will require having good software to manage it all. Whether you're looking for something specific, like pest control software, or just general service technician-scheduling software, you need something to handle stringent technician schedule demands.
Give a few employee scheduling software solutions a look to see if any of them fit your needs, and then take one or two of them on a test drive. It could totally change the way you run your business for the better.
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