Asset driven organizations spend tremendous amounts of time thinking of new ways to reduce costs, prevent downtime, and ultimately increase their overall performance and revenue. One way to become successful in implementing a sophisticated Field Service Management System (FSM).
Use of Field Service Management software can meet all your demands to manage successfully, watch, and track your field services. But before that, you need to ensure you are getting the best deal for your company.
Here are the ten factors you need to consider while buying Field Service Software:
- User Experience
User experience is essential for every software and especially for software having a pivotal commercial application. It has a direct impact on your employee’s wellbeing. Frequent software crashes, slow instances, difficult navigation, and even hard to understand the UI define the poor user experience.
Not only frustrated employees but along with that, you have to face disappointed customers, which entirely defeats the purpose of using the software in the first place. Make sure you watch out for the user experience of the software. Consult with other users and take reviews from them and other sources.
- Online Reviews
To get to know about the reviews, you just need to look into other businesses like yours that have dealt with issues you might be struggling with and the extent to which the software has helped them. Look for detailed reviews with extensive criticism, explained with pros and cons. Decide accordingly whether the software suits your needs.
- Customer Care Service
You might be well aware of the feeling of sitting on hold for hours, waiting for someone, and if you are unfortunate, you have to contact them repeatedly to get your job done. It is very pesky.Â
Beware of field service software providers that impress prospects with a remarkable pre-purchase experience but fail later on when the lead has converted, and they’re suffering from post-implementation issues. You have to get to know about it much earlier than you integrate it into your daily life.
- Development cycle frequency
It is essential to know about the development cycle, followed by the organization. Most development cycles prove commitment to innovating and improving the existing product since there is no such thing as perfection. This can be a continuous basis as a sign of trust from the organization.
- Training and knowledge base
Creating software as a product is very easy for any tech-savvy user, but it is not the right way to make a full-featured product. High-quality training is essential for the field service organization as a whole to create full-fledged software.
Professional software isn’t cheap, so expectations of a significantly increased efficiency are justified. If your team requires 10% of the features and doesn’t know about the remaining 90% is not profitable. Invest in training your team to use the features of the software entirely.
- Mobility
A field service management software is of no use if it doesn’t have a mobile option. With smart mobile service, technicians can get real-time access to job details such as service requests, invoicing details, and warranty details.
It would help if you tried to look for features such as in-field triage and schedule adjustments based on domain knowledge, availability of parts, and proximity. Allowing technicians this sort of transparency can improve your first-time fix rate and create an opportunity to keep customers. There should also be the accessibility to the software even without the internet so that the work orders and fill updates can still be completed.
- Customer portal
A customer portal is a digital self-service solution that brings choice and visibility to your customers. There are many benefits to having a customer portal, including reducing costs, increasing visibility, expediting cash flow, improving customer communications, enhancing customer experience, and retention. It has also been observed that the customer portal also enhances the revenue of the company.
- Blending dispatching capabilities
FSM software should have accessible dispatching services. If you have a blended workforce, you should search for third-party dispatch software to cater to your company’s needs. The dispatch software should automatically assign jobs to employed, third-party, or simultaneously to a blended workforce. The specified service can allow for more flexibility around delivery and improve profit margins.Â
- Predictive Maintenance Capabilities
In this era, where instant gratification is the market mantra. You need to know about the customer’s problem before they even know about it. Field service IoT solutions provide high-quality predictive maintenance that can fix appliances before an issue even arises.
Connected device data can identify pre-failure conditions and predictive maintenance. This will also give managers plenty of time to schedule a technician for the repair if one is needed on-site.
- Up-to-date
You don’t want to use software that works with old-style workflows, delayed responses, lack of device compatibility, poor UX, and poor customer service. You need to make sure you buy the best up-to-date software, also meeting the above-stated points.
Consult about this with other businesses about the technological time frame of the software. You don’t want to burn your workflow using old software.
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