Unlock the full potential of your field service teams with seamless, real-time collaboration and communication powered by automation tools.
How much time do your field workers spend on their mobile devices to complete service tasks? In today’s fast-paced environment, it’s likely a significant portion of their day. The demand for increased operational efficiency has driven the adoption of digital tools—mobile forms replace paper, and interactive maps with geocoded locations streamline asset maintenance.
While technology is essential, the true power lies in communication and collaboration. Can your field workers and contractors instantly connect with operations, dispatch, or peers? Are they burdened with switching between multiple applications to complete a single work order? Most importantly, does your field service mobile application facilitate seamless communication and collaboration?
In the evolving field service landscape, collaboration and communication are crucial to conducting business effectively. Whether your job is maintaining assets or managing teams, seamless communication, and collaboration are the backbone of success.
Real-time collaboration is transformative for mobile workers. Let’s explore a few key collaboration solutions that can significantly impact the future of field service management.
Full History of a Service or Maintenance Work Order
Nothing is worse than scheduling a technician for a service or maintenance call and receiving multiple inquiries about the previous work history for the site or asset by that company.
Capturing information against work orders is standard operating procedure—or at least, it should be. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Information often gets lost in a web of text messages and phone calls to operations. In heavily regulated industries, a lack of records can lead to compliance issues, which is unacceptable and may result in hefty fines.
Accurate records and documentation around work orders, assets, and customers affect every aspect of the business. Instead of missing critical data required for past, present, and future work, in-app collaboration can help reduce knowledge gaps by automatically capturing information directly on the work order.
The next time that customer or asset needs servicing, all information is immediately available to the technician at their fingertips.
Get Answers Faster = Complete More Jobs
Field service communication between operations managers, dispatchers, technicians, or customers should be a top priority for many businesses.
Why make a customer wait if an automated notification can alert them to a schedule change? This simple act can significantly improve the customer experience and service perception.
The most important thing to remember is the end goal: increasing efficiency and improving the customer experience. With that in mind, ensuring that your field workers can communicate and collaborate seamlessly without switching between multiple applications is essential.
The right field service management software should provide embedded real-time messaging and collaboration. Within the same mobile application, the technician should be able to click a button to collaborate, send messages, conduct video calls, or communicate in a group conversation. They should not have to leave the application.
The only way to impact efficiency is to ensure they can remain in the same app, including the ability to share assets, work orders, and forms or document links in messages. The bottom line is field service technicians must be able to complete their work using one application.
Notifications from Dispatch, Operations, or Supervisors
One of the quickest ways to improve technician productivity is through notifications. Open lines of communication are critical for efficiency, whether in the office or the field.
Automating tasks that would otherwise be manual—such as alerting a customer that a technician is running late by 10 minutes or notifying a technician of a change in their route for the day—saves significant time in the long run. Those seemingly small minutes add up over days, weeks, and months.
Creating automated alerts and notifications greatly reduces strain on your team as well. You no longer have to worry about the customer when you know they have been notified of a change. That puts you in control of the customer experience.
The Future of Field Service Management
Real-time collaboration and messaging are technologies that can significantly improve service management. The benefits are substantial and should be a key consideration as you evaluate field service automation software to meet your needs now and in the future.
