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G enerating the 'best' customer appointments, scheduling the correct skilled employees, organising field service tours sensibly - work order planning and customer service is a constant puzzle. Leading software solutions simplify tasks, create transparency, and build efficiency and productivity.

Service managers face the same challenge of scheduling and accounting for a level of 'unknown' work orders every day. They receive tickets for repairs and maintenance requests from a contact centre/helpdesk and must provide suitable technicians/operatives and materials as quickly as possible. In addition, they must minimise travel times and idle time and use all available resources as efficiently as possible.

WHAT DOES EFFICIENT WORK ORDER PLANNING LOOK LIKE FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE?

Only if all these points succeed can your field service expect to provide a reliable, consistently-good customer service. This is characterised by the following points:

• Short turnaround times between appointment request, appointment confirmation, and order execution
• Consideration of customer requirements and restrictions in scheduling
• Prioritisation of individual appointments according to urgency/SLA
• Low rate of absenteeism and high success rate of work orders thanks to suitably skilled and equipped employees - equally trained in customer field service
• High efficiency through short travel routes and as many assignments per field worker as possible whilst maintaining quality

TOO MANY TOOLS COMPLICATE OPERATIONAL FIELD PLANNING

To achieve this, many companies juggle a variety of different tools in their field work order planning:

The orders are recorded via the contact centre/helpdesk and forwarded to the service department by e-mail or internal order.

Availability data of the service employees comes from the HR software or their own calendar. Appointments are coordinated manually with the clients.

Route planning dispatchers or service staff use simple maps or free route planners such as Google Maps/Waze.

Internal communication is carried out via telephone, e-mail or messenger and the visit orders or appointments for customer servicing are coordinated via a common calendar/Outlook.

This is not only exhausting, but often creates additional work. Each appointment must be created and reconciled several times in different systems and there is little transparency in job planning. This type of system is prone to errors and requires an enormous amount of work to function efficiently.

HOW FIELD ORDER PLANNING AND CUSTOMER SERVICE BECOMES EASIER

Digitisation offers a great opportunity for order planning in customer service: Instead of transferring the old processes one-to-one into digital workflows, with the right software you can bundle all important information and data in one place and into one programme. This makes your customer service efforts much easier:

• All data on field service staff, customers, and work orders in one system
• Direct integration of interactive communication tools
• Automatic connection and synchronisation with other departments and programmes
• Optimised deployment and route/tour planning according to the desired 'cost' parameters
• Cost savings through minimised planning effort and more efficient shifts
• Lower error rate and fewer erroneous visits thanks to smart planning

SOFTWARE FOR SCHEDULING AND ROUTE PLANNING IMPROVES CUSTOMER SERVICE

Specialist software solutions for scheduling and route planning ensure more efficient, easier, and faster work order planning in customer service. They manage and account for all the restrictions of visit orders and consistently calculate the optimised assignments and tours.

This benefits not only your dispatchers, but also your field staff. Especially in combination with a field service app, a route planning software tailored to your needs unfolds its full potential:

• Streamlined communication with the head office
• Schedule in real time, for continuous live optimisation
• Digital workflows facilitate documentation and order processing
• Shorter journeys save time and money
• More time for the actual work with the customer
• Less overtime/home on time
• Efficient work increases satisfaction and loyalty

ADVANTAGES OF EFFECTIVE FIELD ORDER PLANNING FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS

In the end, it is the job of customer services to ensure the buyers of your products and services are happy. Whether or not this succeeds depends largely on the performance of your employees in the field. Coherent customer service order planning can make a decisive contribution to this:

You achieve a high degree of adherence to schedules and bindingness of appointment information and appointments. A good planning tool allows for a quick response in case of emergencies and cancellations. Customers receive updates and notifications about field service arrival times (ETA). The success rate of service calls is high (high first-time-fix rate).