ProTip: 4 ways to improve your field workforce productivity

This is a guest post by Zuper.

To effectively manage and monitor their deskless workforce, field service organizations need to be more closely connected to these “invisible employees”—as well as customers—via technology. This is due to some common challenges many are facing in managing their field workforce, such as:

  • No visibility on workforce utilization, resulting in low first-time fix rate and repeat visits
  • Using multiple disparate tools to run service businesses, resulting in loss of critical information
  • No collaboration between the field workforce and back office, resulting in low-quality jobs
  • Limited visibility on KPIs, analytics, and performance metrics to run operations effectively

There is often a lack of clarity and a disconnect at all levels of the organization dealing with the field workforce, which results in poor customer experience. With the massive growth in the on-demand economy, there is no tolerance for mediocre services anymore. This is hurting organizations that are not proactive in modernizing their field workforce management.

Fortunately, field service management platforms like Zuper have emerged to address these specific challenges for businesses. Here are four ProTips about how you can use the Zuper and Zoho CRM integration to improve your field workforce productivity.

ProTip 1: Eliminate paperwork

Many organizations are dependent on manual paperwork for most business processes dealing with their field workforce. This can be a huge burden for organizations seeking productivity and efficiency improvements as manual processes are resource-intensive and error-prone. The advent of mobile apps has been transformational, removing conventional manual processes and modernizing field workforce management, including servicing and repairing of machinery, compliance visits, logistics, security services, and many other aspects.

Benefit: Mobile solutions enable process automation and self-service. All the information collected in the field can seamlessly flow into appropriate systems in real-time without manual interference. Organizations must adopt a mobility suite to empower the field workforce with technology and automate the business processes.

ProTip 2: Empower your field workforce to collaborate efficiently

Improved communication and collaboration are taken for granted in this modern world. However, organizations struggle with teams operating in silos without the right technology and processes to effectively work together. Efficient problem solving on the field or at a customer location requires the key stakeholders to operate in unison. The field workforce needs to access the previous history of a work order, get help from peers, and collaborate with customer support and back office in real time to operate at their full potential. Organizations are using WhatsApp as a communication channel with the field workforce, but it is an isolated and non-productive approach.

Benefit: Organizations must invest in the right technology that enables strong collaboration and ensures each field employee is connected, communicates effectively, and has access to the right information. This can make your organization that much more flexible and capable of responding to customer needs as quickly as possible.

ProTip 3: Schedule and dispatch smoothly

Traditional approaches to scheduling and dispatching field workforces are mundane and time-consuming. Organizations are spending days, weeks, and months of manual efforts but are still struggling to streamline these processes. Uber has completely transformed these aspects with technology and changed the mindset of both organizations and consumers. Scheduling and dispatching require a modern, dynamic, and real-time approach where dispatchers must be aware of all the activities from the field, pending or late jobs, and other changes as they unfold.

Benefit: Modern organizations equip their dispatch center with the right tools and technology to track scheduling deviations and cancellations on the fly and adjust in real-time. With smarter systems, organizations can automate scheduling and rescheduling based on criteria such as skills, locations, performance, weather, traffic, and more while improving productivity.

ProTip 4: Create a culture of data-driven decision-making 

Data should be at the heart of strategic decision-making in businesses. Data leads to insights, and leaders can leverage these insights to drive actions. Organizations are either not collecting data for consumption or not deriving meaningful insights from the collected data to drive decision-making. This affects the productivity and utilization of the field workforce. Organizations must adopt the right platform to enable data-driven decision making.

Benefit: The right platform can offer a 360-degree view of the field workforce’s productivity and utilization. This will enable organizations to continuously measure, learn, and evolve business processes and workflows to meet the modern requirements and stay ahead of the competition.

Unlocking productivity with Zuper and Zoho CRM

Empower your field workforce to operate at their best potential by integrating Zuper with Zoho CRM. Zuper offers an intelligent field service and customer engagement platform to enable organizations to offer on-demand and connected customer experience with the best utilization of the distributed field workforce.

Try Zuper for Zoho CRM


Work smarter by adding new capabilities to Zoho CRM with business solutions from Zoho Marketplace. Explore Zoho Marketplace >

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