Perhaps Your Company Needs a Tech Pill called Custella
Every organization out there vies for the best talent for the job. It goes without saying that with smart and efficient workers, a business will experience high productivity, and naturally, high revenue. Unfortunately, motivation and efficiency levels differ from one employee to the next. To put things into perspective, they can be classified into 3 categories: the slacker, the worker, and the entrepreneur.
Slackers are in the job purely for the money. Hardworking at the start, they eventually become lazy and mediocre in their performance. Workers are responsible and committed to their job, but may not go beyond what is expected of them. Entrepreneurs go above and beyond to deliver on their tasks and exceed expectations.
Due to the presence of entrepreneurs and workers, business output (or results) is good. That’s great, isn’t it? But what management may fail to see are the unobtrusive slackers who are hiding behind the good work put forth by the workers and entrepreneurs.
What We May Fail To See
Take Joe as an example. He has a brilliant resume and lists “time management” and “pro-active” as part of his attributes. Shortly after joining the company as a sales rep, he begins to drag his feet in assignments. Perhaps he is losing focus on what’s important. Joe meets his quota of deliverables, but with a resume as impressive as his, he could definitely do more.
Any business would want its employees to maximize their output. Perhaps what can help Joe is a tool that can prioritize his day for him and eliminate some of the manual, administrative work involved, so he is able to focus on what’s important. This is what Custella is designed to do.
This powerful field service optimization (FSO) tool can optimize his daily schedule with just a few clicks and even suggest recommended routes to take to accomplish tasks.
This means that Joe would be spending less time planning his day, less time on the road, and more time with clients.
How Do You Optimize Operations?
Studies in the west have shown that employees typically spend over 50 minutes a day on non-work related matters. Surveying more than 35,000 daily activity logs of workers in the US, the study found that employees waste an average of 7% of the day not working during work hours.
Malaysians clock more average hours at work than their western counterparts, opening up the possibility that a large percentage of this is spent slacking as well.
…employees waste an average of 7% of the day not working during work hours.
An article by Forbes reveals that a lack of good company policies and failure to keep employees in check has given way to a rise in corruption among employees.
A Global Economic Crime and Fraud survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) stated that Malaysian companies reported economic crimes to have increased from 28% in 2016 to 41% by 2018. In fact, 69% of these offenses were committed by employees and resulted in financial losses of more than USD1 million (approx. RM4 million).
An instance of this is the case where sales agents for company ABC are mobilized to attend meetings with potential clients over the course of the week. However, instead of heading directly to the meeting venue, the agents take longer routes in pursuit of non-work related tasks and go on to claim higher transportation/travel costs from company ABC.
What company ABC needs is an optimization tool like Custella which enables them to get a view of employee whereabouts and task status with just a few clicks. Custella essentially provides an automated solution that assists managers with juggling clients and their field service teams. In this technologically driven world, the word “automated” comes with two powerful connotations: cost-effective, and time-saving.
Some of Custella’s Features
1. Less headache with task assignments
With Custella, managers no longer have to undergo the hassle of manually assigning tasks to field agents as the delegation is automated by Custella according to availability, utilization, skill, and location of agents. This means that the best-fit agent is automatically selected for the task and tasks are distributed resourcefully among the workforce.
2. Provides automated solutions
What’s amazing is that if a new and urgent order comes up out of the blue, Custella can automatically find an agent that is available and is the nearest to the task location, without manager interference
3. Instantly schedules your day
Custella also provides intelligent scheduling by factoring in criteria such as time, distance, or priority, and will reshuffle the day’s tasks accordingly, therefore optimizing the agent’s day. This can be taken a step further with Custella factoring in buffer time taken to walk from the parking lot to the customer’s doorstep, therefore ensuring field agents are always on time and have no excuse to be delayed.
4. Gives you a holistic view
Custella’s features also include real-time location mapping and task status, providing managers with live locations of field service agents and the status of the tasks from its inception till completion. Even if field agents are in different states or countries, managers can receive and process new sales orders, thus saving time and effort that may otherwise be wasted while waiting for the agents to return back to the office.
5. Feeds you with the latest data
In addition to that, Custella gives real-time data and managers can easily edit and customize reports and immediately export them. With more accurate and up to date data, managers can make smarter business decisions that would impact the future.
Custella can automatically find an agent that is available and is the nearest to the task location, without manager interference.
By studying real-time data on agent utilization, actual versus planned routes taken, and performance, managers can keep their field agents’ priorities in check. This is a monumental tool when it comes to a rapidly growing business that is looking to optimize business operations and expand in a cost-effective manner.
In A Nutshell
Custella is a mobile and web application designed to eliminate time-consuming and manual work processes for both managers and field agents.
It can help employees focus on what’s important, and give them the direction they may require. Custella may not necessarily be the answer to moving slackers into the worker/ entrepreneur category, as there may be a larger issue at play such a company culture or just misalignment of purpose.
But Custella can be a means to help employees accomplish more, and consequently boost a company’s ROI in them. Using automation, optimization, and real-time analytics, Custella can, therefore, help companies address:
- a culture of complacency and dishonesty
- the complexities of managing field teams and a minefield of information
- high resource cost
Watch this video to understand how Custella works:
This article was written by The Custella team and first appeared on the Custella website.
If you’re interested to know more, visit www.custella.com or drop an email to hello@custella.com.