What is Field Service Automation? What are the Advantages of It?

The field service management market will reach $10.81 billion by 2026. There is an increasing demand for mobility to acquire real-time visibility. Also, there is a surge in the adoption of digitalization & automation in the field service industry.

But, field service organizations are facing four challenges nowadays in the Covid era

• Ensuring the safety of employees and consumers
• Fulfilling increasing demands with a reduced workforce and reducing field service cost
• Maintaining high-quality standards
• Dealing with uncertainty

Field service automation is a one-stop solution for your company to overcome the challenges that Covid-19 has brought onto all of us. But how? Well, continue reading the blog to find it out what is field service automation and what its benefits?

What is Field Service Automation?

Field service automation is the collective processes, policies, and procedures that an FSM organization uses to manage resources.

The word “automation” represents the major technological aspects to streamline the business processes, policies, and even procedures.

What Are The Benefits of Field Service Automation

1. Automation Simplifies Workflow Management

   Many FSM companies are inefficient in most of their tasks. But why? Well, that’s because their workflow management is unnecessarily complex.

   As per the recent survey by UiPath, it has been found that almost 67% of global workers feel crushed by repetitive tasks.

   Field service automation simplifies the workflows of the technicians. It implements an agile method to process the service request faster and efficiently. All of this enables field teams to find customers’ locations quickly, all in a few clicks away.

2. Eliminates Manual Effort

   Manually performing tasks like data analysis, tracking technicians, managing schedules, and updating service requests can become a headache.

   Moreover, manually scheduling multiple service tasks to field technicians also hinders agent efficiency. Field service solution automation eliminates these tasks and frees up valuable time for your service teams to focus on helping the customer.

3. Businesses are More Efficient, and Service Delivery is Faster

   In your field service organization, you’ll come across many time-consuming tasks. But, if you have a field service automation system in your business, you can efficiently perform such tasks within a short period.

   Getting real-time access to work order information gives each technician a direct view into the customer’s history, their pain points, any special instructions, and available parts so they can complete their task on time.

   Moreover, you can maintain strong bonding with your field teams and even maintain customer engagement on a large scale using a field service mobile app.

   Field service software enables technicians to deal with various customer appointments, view service history, job history, and even work with back-office systems. With its mobile access, the field workers can easily view the customer information like locations with GPS tracking, work history, and other factors to get there faster and improve efficiency.

4. Improves Coordination Among Teams

   One of the major pain points service companies face is a lack of coordination with their field workers.

   The FSM software solutions in your business can make it easy to automate the field worker’s workflow. As a result, the communication becomes relatively smooth between technicians and office staff. Apart from this, the software solution plays a vital role in streamlining the entire process, starting from scheduling to report generations, converting it into business intelligence.

   As a bonus, field service management that includes route optimization features can quickly plan the best route for daily service or readjust for one-off needs due to repairs and maintenance.

   Once you adopt FSM software in your field organization, all the essential field operations are centralized at one location, making it easy for you to streamline service delivery. In short, the coordination becomes powerful if your service team accesses the company data and customer portal details from a single place.

5. Schedule Technicians Work in Real-Time

   The field service technicians can quickly receive notifications to perform the right task at the right time using a field service automation solution. It is possible by connecting any smartphones, tablets for service techs, and other mobile devices with your organization’s field service automation solution.

   It gets supported by a native field service mobile app that allows field service technicians and service managers to access data online and offline.

   You have the absolute power to create and manage the technician’s work schedules. Also, your technicians can make changes in schedules as and when required.

   Technicians get real-time notifications on their mobile app when a task gets assigned to them.

   Once the schedule is created, a real-time notification is sent to your mobile device.

   Moreover, a technician can efficiently deal with asset management, inventory management, service-level agreements (SLAs), and more while working in the field.

6. Sending Invoices Will Be Quicker

   With the help of mobile accessibility, it becomes pretty easy for the technicians to submit all the information about the job performed. It can be total time spent, parts and materials used, and even take the customer’s electronic signature while still working onsite.

   By having such information, mobile field service automation software automatically generates an invoice for the work done, considering discounts and warranties.

7. Provide Better Customer Service

   Your top priority is to create a positive customer experience. For that, you need to work hard and provide the best services to them.

   Improve your customer relationship management, consumer services, customer satisfaction, technician experience, efficiency, and profitability with mobile field service automation.

   Powered by machine learning, chatbots will understand if a customer needs assistance resolving an issue or wants more information about a specific piece of equipment. AI can also automate the technician’s workflow.

   Nowadays, many leading field service solution management businesses utilize predictive analytics to foresee the needs of their customers and ensure a seamless service experience every time they are engaged. It will increase the efficiency of your business.

   When your field technicians complete the task at hand efficiently, you get customer satisfaction.

   No one wants to deal with multiple visits, delayed service, or lack of coherence when the field representatives arrive. It’s less of a hassle if the technician has the information on hand from their dispatching software. They will be able to solve the issue quickly that the customer is experiencing.

   Customers have little tolerance for mix-ups or field service organizations that aren’t prepared for the job when they arrive.

   It’s very easy to implement automation in your field service business using FSM software. You can avail all the benefits of field service management software by implementing it in your field service business.

Conclusion
We hope you got a clear idea about field service automation and how it helps you streamline your field service operations. The benefits of cost reduction and gains in productivity from field service automation are tangible and measurable.

Field service automation software typically covers almost all the business activities and makes the work easy for you and your field staff. Such software solutions help you overcome the complexities you face in scheduling, dispatching, and even generating reports.

You’ll come across many FieldCamp – field service scheduling software that can help your business to deal with such factors. But the best which understands your business values and allows you to enhance your business efficiency. FieldCamp is a one-stop solution for managing your business, from scheduling to generating reports and even dealing with technician scheduling.