With the success of new-age companies like Uber,’ automation has become a trend not just in the transportation domain, but also in other fields, especially the ones that deal with field services.
As per a Capterra research, 47% of surveyed companies have reported witnessing a considerable increase in their number of finished jobs per day after using Field Service Management (FSM) software and around 97% of software users has reported witnessing some other kinds of impact on their businesses
The FSM software-led automation has made its way even in the HVAC industry, as it effectively manages the field services, thus, more and more service providers have started relying on it. With the growing acceptance of FSM software, new trends are emerging in the domain of field services and every field agent must know about these trends to stay competitive in their field of work. Here is the list of four compelling trends.
1) Automation in Job Scheduling
Job scheduling in field services has always been one of the biggest conce
s for both on-field technicians and in-house dispatchers. The manual way of job-scheduling leads to errors like double booking, allocation of far-off job location that leads to too much travelling, missed appointments because of field agent’s unavailability etc. But HVAC work order software systems eliminate all these errors by offering automated and real-time scheduling provision that allocates a job only to the nearest available field technicians.
Also, the software automatically redirects specific tasks to specific technicians, so that no technician gets placed in the wrong job, that too after spending his time and money on travelling.
2) Increased Utilization of Enterprise Data
Earlier it was acceptable if the field technician functions only within the limits of his job role and delay in rendering faster resolutions because of information shortage was also acceptable as it was difficult to provide the field technician with right data while on the move. But things are changing now.
HVAC software functions as a cloud-based centralized repository of enterprise data that can be accessed by the technician on a real-time basis.
In fact, many enterprises are utilizing the HVAC work order software to capture the troubleshooting experiences reported by each field agent. In this way, enterprises are building a knowledge management system, which is then made available for real-time access so that field agents can get the insights of the troubleshooting process of a new problem.
Thus, the technician can utilize the enterprise data for checking out troubleshooting tutorials, services/products quotations for upselling and cross-sell, clients’ details, service history and other task-related information.
3) Improved Time-keeping
Traditionally, field technicians use to manually fill the timesheets at the end of the day, but this recall-and-file format is not just a time-consuming tedious job but also can create accuracy gap.
HVAC service app supports reporting on a real-time basis, which is to make time-keeping more accurate and organized.
4) Improved Customer Communication
HVAC field agents will witness improvement in customer communication as well. HVAC Software is effective in streamlining the customer communication process by utilizing various automation technologies such as regular alerts, chatbots, emails, customer portal, mobile apps, etc.
Final Thoughts
FSM software has brought in the trend of increased professionalism and visibility in the field services segment. It is defining better corporate standards for employees and ease-of-business standards for the customers.