How to reduce field service operation costs without compromising on service quality?

by Mike Kelvin Business Head of Kellton Service quality is vitally important for any service provider. But the cost of service delivery often takes a toll on quality. Businesses do adopt various cost-cutting practices to raise their profit margin, or sometimes just to avoid losses. But business leaders understand that compromised service quality is not a permanent solution, as it will eventually put their business into a bad light. So, what is the solution? How businesses can reduce the service cost without compromising on quality?

Check the areas where field service operation expenses can be adjusted

Having a detailed insight into your field service expenses will let you realize that there are plenty of scopes wherein by improving the field operations you can minimize your field service operation expenses and thus reduce the overall service cost. But you need a Field Service management software to get the data-driven insight to identify the possibilities where you can reduce field operations costs.

• Travel Expenses: Have you tried making a data analysis of why your travel expenses are so high. Are the number of follow-up trips more than the no, of resolved issues? Then it implies the first-visit effectiveness is low in your team.  The reasons can be many: inefficient technicians, unplanned scheduling, scheduling conflict, lack of customer information, unavailability of essential tools, etc. The point is, your business makes profits from no. of resolved issues in a day, but if your follow up trips are more than the issues resolved, then people and service delivery inefficiency is raising your travel costs.

• Hiring, Training, and Development Expenses: Having a detailed insight into the performances of your technicians or field staff is very important. If you have a highly efficient resource, then you must not lose him as hiring, training, and the development of new resources will cost you a lot. Moreover, bad hiring is again an unnecessary and unproductive costing that you would prefer to avoid in every possible way. Similarly, if you have inefficient technicians, then not just they are failing to keep up your service quality but also causing those unwanted follow-up trips.

• Manual Methods of Field Operations: Are your technicians still use paper & pen to capture the field reports? That means you are still paying that middle man (typist) who is converting those hard copies to soft copies. Are your field technicians still report back to the office at the end of the day just to file their daily report, then again, they are taking up unnecessary traveling and also wasting their productive hours. So manual methods are neither efficient nor cost-effective.

How field management software can control the field service operation costs?

Up-to-date scheduling practice: With the aid of automation rendered by a field service management software, the manager can streamline the job schedules in such a way that the technicians can be more productive. The software provides the manager an easy glance into

• No. of pending jobs
• No. of new service calls
• No. of available technicians
• The current job location of each technician
• The log-in and log-out time of a job
•  The estimated travel time from one location to other
• Being handy with all these data, he can assign jobs more efficiently.

Improved first visit effectiveness: The software is an apt platform through which all the field technicians can have real-time access to relevant data like customer profile (service history, contract warranty, etc), inventory (dead stock, available stock, requirement list, etc), troubleshooting tutorials, service quotes, etc. Being handy with information enables them to act more efficiently on their first visit and this can resolve the issue of follow-u trips.

Automated methods for administrative tasks:  The field service software facilitates the shift to automation to handle various administrative tasks like recording field data, daily worksheet filling, job scheduling, performance analysis of technicians through their individual no. issues solved, follow-up trips, customer’s feedback, etc

Conclusion

Field operation expenses can be roughly aligned to areas like Travel, Inventory, customer management, hiring, training and development, administrative cost, overhead cost, etc.  A field service software is a tech-enabler that lets you reduce field service operation cost without hampering the quality of the service, rather it streamlines your field operations letting you deliver more quality services.

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Created on Oct 19th 2020 06:00. Viewed 343 times.

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