BLOG / SOLUTIONS

• Achieving customer satisfaction for the service received
• Enabling the field workforce to be as productive as possible
• Making sure the field workforce has job satisfaction
• Improving first time fix rates and thus more customer satisfaction
• Reducing or keeping costs under tight control

One theme that is consistent through all these is how effectively the company can conduct their engineer workforce scheduling to get field engineers to the customers. Customer service agents have the challenge to meet customer expectations for quick attendance when an appointment is required and not to wait around all day for the engineer to arrive.  A manual scheduling method to agree these appointment quickly requires a larger than necessary workforce and typically still means all day appointments, with morning or afternoon only offered by exception.

Diary planners struggle with the conflicting priorities of customer demand, SLA, engineer personalities and what they can determine from a map. They do not have time to compute every potential journey using Google and it simply isn’t feasible to do this manually with effective results. Consequently, field service engineers are either working in fixed postcode areas which is inefficient or regularly cross over each other and then face customer complaints over their time keeping. Even worse, field service engineers, albeit understandably, often blame the company and those responsible for field service scheduling and field service appointment making. One answer can be to upgrade your service management system but this wide reaching approach is high effort and there may be internal resistance to change if your systems are otherwise working well for contract terms, contact centre, data capture, assets, history, costings, billing, reporting profitability etc.

Also, the advanced scheduling capability provided by FLS VISITOUR is a specialist function that service management software providers do not have in-house and this will be clear once you have delved below the marketing speak. Wouldn’t it be better if advanced field service scheduling or appointment scheduling software could be effectively bolted on to your existing service management system? The improvements for customer service, workforce scheduling, workforce optimisation and ultimately productivity would be huge. FLS - FAST LEAN SMART partner with many of the service management software providers to provide this advanced field force scheduling capability, including Microsoft Dynamics 365, Dynamics AX, Dynamics CRM, Infor, Salesforce Field Service Lightning, SAP ERP, CRM and S/4HANA.