Cashing In The Big Bucks

How to Profit from Your FSO Investment
By The Custella Team

It’s a competitive world we find ourselves in. Field service organizations providing service delivery have changed radically to meet the challenges they face selling their services. With competition comes a new breed of customers that look for value in the money they are spending, exploring the option that gives them high worth. This has turned the field service industry into one that is focusing on optimizing their operations by cutting down on unnecessary costs and increasing their profit margins.

Now aided by technology such as mobile devices and smart tech, there are ways for field service to streamline their efficiency and offer better value to customers. Profit margins are curving downwards with customers now demanding more for less, causing field service organizations to take a close look at the way they conduct their business. An innovative way to do this is through adopting a field service optimization tool that gives administrators and field agents a way to make their job easier, conduct it faster, and more efficiently.

So what exactly does buying into a Field Optimization Tool get you?

A Blueprint to Make Sense of the Chaos

A key area of optimization is developing better scheduling and dispatching practices. To increase profit margins, and meet customer demands for faster service, growing revenue comes from the ability of your field agent to complete more service calls at a faster rate. Every moment of idle time squandered by a field agent is a revenue opportunity being wasted. So, with proper scheduling and dispatch tools in a field service software such as Custella, organizations can better schedule their field agents to fulfill the most service calls in their scheduled shift.

Dispatching managers need a system where they can make changes to the schedule on the fly, without needing to communicate via a call with the agents in the field. With a native mobile field service app, the next scheduled service call will appear on their device when they close out the call they are on. It means field agents are getting a full schedule for their day, as managers can rearrange their schedule to better optimize it for more calls. At the same time, customers are getting a more precise window of when an agent will be on site. Happy customers result in more sales, and that’s one avenue you’ll see your ROI (return of investment) marching back in through.

Field service organizations are now turning to subcontractors to fulfill the growing needs of their organization. By hiring subcontractors, field service organizations can increase their workforce, without increasing their budget for that workforce. Subcontractors are only hired and paid when there is work to be completed. Some organizations have adopted this method as their entire business model, hiring only a few full-time field agents and instead utilizing the growing network of subcontractors that is available.

Prompt Billing, while Saving Up

An area where field service organizations can save on is office administration costs, which can be reduced with fewer people working in a call center or dispatching roles. It can also be reduced by setting up levels of automation in a field service software that do the tasks otherwise done by administrators.

With accounting integrations, automation can also lead to faster billing times. A technician completing an Air Cond installation, for instance, can capture signatures on their mobile device in the field and close out a work order. This will immediately trigger an invoice to be sent to the customer, depending on the level of review the organization has. The invoicing process thus goes from weeks to literally seconds, without the need to physically enter in data from the work order into the accounting software, as it is already completed thanks to Custella’s integration.

Mobility Matters when You’re Always on the Move

When trying to optimize service delivery, adding mobile functionality is something field service organizations are embracing. This adds tools that can make a field agent more efficient in their work, and gives them the capability to optimize their day-to-day job. In the changing landscape of field service delivery where speed and efficiency are critical components, mobile field service app features allow field agents to have everything they need to complete a service call on their mobile device, without the need for time-consuming manual data entry.

Routing tools help field agents get to their next call faster. It cuts down on the time they are spending finding the quickest route, being stuck in traffic, and looking for the customer’s location. Idle time can eat into profit margins, as the time technicians are spending not moving towards their call or being stuck in traffic, is revenue being wasted.

Ushering in a Hassle-Free Era

Service level agreements and preventative maintenance contracts can be automated with Custella to process sales orders, create job orders, and record point of sales. While it reduces the time needed to create these job orders (as they are handled by the field service software and not an administrator), it also ensures that these service calls aren’t missed when it’s time to complete the work. Job orders are automatically created and are waiting to be dispatched for fast service.

1. Speedy information at your fingertips
Having inventory records on hand is needed if you want to deliver fast response times to your customers. While you can plan for projects and contractual jobs, break/fix repairs are unexpected and sometimes the job goes to the company who can do the repair the fastest, as it could be an emergency. And if the field service organization can’t do same day service and must wait for the part to be ordered in, a customer will move on to find an organization who can facilitate their needs. Custella addresses this need by providing options for the agent who can respond the quickest even in non-time sensitive cases.

2. A Rapid, Precise, and (best of all) Automated Billing process
Having an automated billing process frees up manpower that would otherwise have to be devoted to tracing financial transactions, leaving the workspace free for other further savings. Custella allows its field agents to keep clear records at the point of sales, taking records (and even photos) of the transactions and invoices customers promptly.

3. Addressing the shift to subcontractors
With subcontractors using Custella, expansion into an additional territory is possible with minimal start-up cost. Service that is out of the scope of your current technicians can still be completed by a subcontractor with a specific skill set. And there is no idle time between jobs, as once a subcontractor is finished, the job is over.

“Happy customers results in more sales, and that’s one avenue you’ll see your ROI (return of investment) marching back in through.”

“The invoicing process thus goes from weeks to literally seconds, without the need to physically enter in data.”

In a Nutshell

As a mobile and web application, Custella can provide a fulfilling return of investment, through various avenues of optimization and service quality.

Field service organizations can’t rely on product margins and attached services to pad their bottom line. They simply must deliver a strong valued service to attract customers, while not dropping their standards to retain their customers. At the same time, they need to find ways internally to reduce costs of delivering exceptional service. Custella is how service organizations can maximize their service delivery and reduce excessive spending. It can make field agents more efficient with scheduling, dispatch tools, and mobility solutions, and also give greater insight to products and key client data.

Using automation, optimization, and real-time analytics, Custella can help companies address:

• inefficiencies in their current operations that is costing them revenue
• slow/ traditional billing methods
• changes emphasizing the role of subcontractors

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