Today, more than ever, companies are under pressure to cut costs while customers grow more sophisticated and more demanding. We live in a time that has shifted into sixth gear, and we have to keep up or go under. The market offers customers more competition and easy ways to switch supplier — exactly what every company wants to avoid. You cannot afford to sleep through important changes. The worst nightmare is losing customers who were unhappy with the way your service operation treated them. Even more frustrating for the people managing a team is watching technicians run out of hours and feeling the chaos take over.

Let us be honest

Service delivery limps along in a lot of companies. The problem is managing the service operation effectively, and in an age of highly informed customers who know your competitors’ offers inside out, that has become critical. A customer who bounces off your door may never come back. That is the nightmare of any business in the service industry.

The benefits of excellent customer service — in reputational terms, but also in hard financial terms — often fail to find their proper place in the budget. We are not good at putting a price on them. Worse, sometimes we do not price them at all. And yet all of us can run a SWOT analysis, and under threats we would surely write “poor service quality”. But we cannot, or will not, convert that into money. So when we look for a fix for a service operation that is not working properly, we often forget how much benefit a modern solution such as field service management software can bring. Fieldworker is exactly that kind of solution. We focus on the cost of buying the software, when the software is what will improve the way service is managed.

Patience runs out eventually

And how many jobs have slipped through our fingers simply because we had no one available to carry out the work? Even the most loyal employees run out of patience eventually. There is no room for sentiment when our customers are racing against the clock themselves.

Wide of the mark

Companies often decide to increase their marketing spend. Senior managers focus on brand awareness — that is where the wallet opens more often and wider. But will even the best advertising, run by a top agency, not turn out to be a complete flop if the brilliant slogan is not backed by the best product, the best service and the best support?

Fieldworker keeps up with change

Customer feedback is the best source of knowledge there is about improving a business. But what then? Fortunately the people who built Fieldworker anticipated that collecting that valuable information would matter when planning your team’s work. The app also optimises the time and the routes of technicians travelling to customers. Managing time is critical to improving service efficiency. Using the app brings satisfaction not only to the owners of the business but to the technicians themselves, who can maintain the relationships they have built with customers far more easily.