The top challenges that break field service companies

There are many reasons to sweat in the field service industry—the heat from the burning sun, handling of heavy machinery among others. But do you know one offbeat reason that makes field service providers sweat?

Challenges!

When running a field service company, you deal with elaborate tools and processes in managing every aspect of your business, including technicians, equipment, and contracts while balancing resources and customer demands. All these are tough deals. But there are really some top challenges that can bring your field service company to the ground unless you speedily find workable solutions to tackle them.

1. Poor Communication with Customers

Your business will cripple when your customers lose faith in you. What your customers ultimately want is an assurance that you’re going to solve their problem and they can rely on you in the long term.

With their trust in you for a resolution, they expect their needs and habits to be central in your solutions. So when you fail to constantly communicate and update them, you can end up messing up your customer experience, which will shatter the opportunities of long-lasting relationships with them.

Let’s face it, no customer is happy to cancel their plans for the day because you failed to inform them of changes in field service appointments. When you fail to provide accurate ETA’s and useful updates about changes or delays, the outcome will be disgruntled customers. Your field service company will come across as unreliable, and this is far from good news for customer retention and revenue growth.

To avoid this, a proactive communication channel between your field service technicians and customers is key. This is because your customers want to get real-time updates about the work done on faulty equipment when they’re not available. They also want to be able to conveniently cancel or reschedule service appointments. Having a field service software like Field Nexus can seamlessly empower you to do all these and more, making all the difference between your company failing or succeeding.

2. Deficient Spare Parts and Inventory Management

Customers are highly demanding for more visibility and control of their orders, including convenient delivery options. Adding to the growing wave of ecommerce, the customer’s requirements have become more important than ever. These changes have placed more weight on parts inventory control and management, as well as selecting a logistics provider.

When you don’t make these management processes efficient, moving parts will often arrive at the wrong time and the wrong place, the service process will come to a halt and productive time is laid to waste along with potential revenue.

So making money from the aftermarket and maintaining a competitive edge will involve leveraging parts and inventory management solutions. In choosing logistics support, factors like modern cloud-based end-to-end supply chain functionality and visibility are crucial.

For a service management software that will help you grow, software like Field Nexus enables users to streamline the parts movement progression and efficiently manage inventory updates. With a lot of moving parts to be monitored across the supply chain, bringing in this top-class management software to handle assets, set up alerts, and help field technicians monitor and update their inventory can save your company from running out or too high on a particular inventory. This way, you can avoid jeopardizing first-time fix rates and customer satisfaction.

3. Neglecting Emerging Technologies

Field service is not the typical cubicle office business. A significant slice of a field service workforce is much more mobile, executing tasks at remote locations. Because of this, remotely organizing workflow and resources is essential to getting work done efficiently and raising your head above the competition.

This is so as 52% of companies still use manual methods for the bulk of their field service tasks. While the above industry practice might not be a challenge that will break your field service company, deviating from it presents opportunities to work efficiently and beat your competitors.

This is why field service providers should prioritize deploying the best cloud-based field service management software. Using poor applications will only negatively affect the technician’s satisfaction with his work tool and directly impact your bottom line.

You wouldn’t want the technician to abandon or badly execute tasks because of usability and likeability issues with the provided software. Moreover, efficient software ensures the technician has all the information they need, saving you from follow-up costs.

In choosing the right technology for your business, such as a dispatch software, you improve the customer experience and field agent capability to tackle unforeseen developments as they arise, keeping them in touch with important data and updates.

4. Lack of Proper Training

Field service professionals are often in face-time with customers while providing repairs and maintenance. And this is exactly the reason you should invest in proper training for your technicians, as it will heavily impact your long-term success story.

For the best benefits from field service, like improving customer satisfaction and sales, you need to provide technical and field service relationship training to field service agents. Adopting the traditional field service training

models that focus only on technical training have proved insufficient in tapping into the full potentials of field service technicians for your business.

These technicians drive your field service offerings and are your representatives to the customer. So their ability to learn real insights about the customer’s pain points and leverage their interaction to bolster lasting relationships for your company can mean more revenue—or less. Also, service relationship training equips the technician to diplomatically manage escalated situations that can cause the customer to panic or make incessant demands.

While field service training should take a 360-degree perspective when it comes to arming field agents with interpersonal skills, conventional technical training is still very important. Failure to prepare the field technician on handling different hardware and software tools and every other technical process and technique involved will only lead to a breakdown in getting a job done or problems taking longer to resolve.

BEGIN TODAY TO TACKLE THESE CHALLENGES

While these challenges can have dreadful consequences on your field service business, it doesn’t need to ever get to that point. All you need to do is to implement the proper processes and have the right service management software in place.

And the best service software that fits your field service needs is Field Nexus. With Field Nexus software, creating work orders, schedules, customer demos and tracking field agents and inventory and more, turns into a simple ABC process.