When is the 'right time' to invest in modern field service technology?

In this blog article, we discuss how investing in modern field service technology can drive up your efficiencies, maintain customer loyalty, enhance the customer experience and maximise your profits to ensure you stay competitive in today’s market.

There’s no denying that the service industry is incredibly competitive. So ensuring your operations are refined and you’re exceeding the expectations of your customers is fundamental to future of your business. The key to achieving this sustainability is adopting modern field service technology. As a result of this, opportunities to reduce costs, improve profits, set higher service standards and increase resilience become attainable.

New advances in technology mean that software is much more capable of making fast, intelligent decisions than ever before. This means you can rely on software to send an engineer who is nearby, with the correct skills and parts to fix the job. Automating your processes through your field service software allow your engineers to complete more tasks per shift and create happy customers by automatically sending communications to keep them updated.  

So without further delay, let’s take a look at some of the benefits modern field service technology can bring to your business:

DRIVE UP EFFICIENCIES.

Connect your systems and let them do the talking. Having a seamlessly connected service operation completely managed through technology allows you to get the job done not only quicker, but in the most cost-effective way. No more re-keying information and cross-referencing systems, you can simply connect and disconnect.

MAINTAIN CUSTOMER LOYALTY.

The easiest way to maintain your contracts is to provide your customers with the best possible service. That means, sending the right engineer, to the right job at the right time. Managing your parts, assets and customers in one solution allows you to provide all the information required to the engineer’s app for a more informed approach meaning you can send the engineer with the correct skills and parts.

IMPROVE YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE.

Provide customers with an effortless and beneficial experience right from the get go. From a speedy booking process to SMS updates every step of the way, the experience your customer receives will have a knock-on effect on their loyalty. As soon as service levels slip, so do your profits. Having a software that is customer focused ensures the experience exceeds expectations.

MAXIMISE YOUR PROFITS.

By managing every detail within one system allows you to track, monitor and continuously make improvements ensuring you always stay profitable. In addition to that, by improving your efficiency, customer loyalty and experience you will naturally maximise profits through retention.

IMPROVE SECURITY

Moving from paper-based processes and in-house servers to cloud infrastructure, will allow you to store all your data safely in the cloud and control user access. Storing all your data in one place will assist with compliance such as GDPR as you can remove data from one location instead of several. In addition to this, you would put the security of your data in the hands of the software vendor. So for example, here at Solarvista Software, we use Microsoft Azure cloud data centres which are renowned for 99.9% up time and world class service trusted by many blue chip organisations across the globe. 

So, when is the right time to invest? Without undue pressure, if you don’t think about investing soon, you are at risk of being left behind. The transformation may be “time consuming” and “too expensive” but weigh that cost to the business against loss of contracts and your way of thinking about digital transformation will take a U-turn.

Start by doing a full SWOT analysis of your service operations, pin-pointing any specific areas where you may not be achieving the standards you had hoped for. Any problems to solve will help you find a solution that ticks all those boxes within a Field Service Management Software.