Questions to Ask When Considering a New Field Service Management Solution
Choosing the right field service management solution is an important decision whether you are looking to save your business time and money, affect your customers’ satisfaction, or both. You need to make sure your field service management solution has all the right features to enable success.
Table of Contents
Where should you start in your research for new Field Service Management Solution?
Here is a guide with questions to help you evaluate different service providers in eleven key areas:
- Scheduling & Routing
- Customer Service
- Mobile Application
- Customer Engagement
- Empowering the Field
- Configurability & Upgrades
- Collaboration
- Implementation & Support
- Emerging Technology
- Integration
- Data Security & Business Continuity
Scheduling & Routing
- Does your current solution schedule jobs sequentially, assign crews to higher-priority jobs first, or assign all work simultaneously?
- How many jobs per day does your mobile workforce perform?
- Does your current solution optimize your workforce and automate the scheduling process while respecting your workforce capacity?
- Do your jobs take more than 1 day to complete?
- If yes, on average how long does 1 job take to complete?
- Do you use third-party contractors? If so, what is the ratio between third party and “badged” employees?
- How long does it take your scheduling engine to route 500 jobs? 1,000 jobs? 10,000 jobs? 50,000 jobs?
- Do you have jobs that are recurring? i.e. Those that are associated with preventative maintenance?
- Are you contractually obligated to your customers to arrive and fix within a certain fixed time?
Customer Service
- Does your solution provide a real-time view of your entire field operations?
- Can you streamline communication between the backoffice and field employees to provide real-time appointment information?
- Can your solution proactively notify customers of any changes that impact their appointment?
- Is your solution able to automatically make pro-active adjustments without manual intervention when changes occur?
Mobile Application
- Does your mobile solution work on any device?
- Can your field employees access their allocated work remotely and receive changes in real-time?
- What happens to the work when the mobile network or Wi-Fi is unavailable?
- How often are your mobile workers leaving your mobile application to perform other job-related tasks?
Customer Engagement
- Does your solution allow your customers to access to realtime appointment information and manage their appointments online?
- Can your solution measure customer satisfaction and provider performance immediately after the service is performed?
Empowering the Field
- Can your Field Supervisors make real-time adjustments when they are the field?
- Can your mobile resources make changes to their schedules in real-time?
- Can your mobile resources request time off directly from their mobile solution?
Configurability & Upgrades
- How configurable is your current solution?
- How customized is your current solution?
- What is the average time to deliver a change to your solution?
- Can authorized users make changes? Or is it only IT or an SI that can make these changes?
- How long did the upgrade take?
- How do upgrades impact your business?
- Can authorized users make changes? Or is it only IT or an SI that can make these changes?
Collaboration
- Does your current solution allow users to collaborate with peers, supervisors, helpdesk and back office while still inside the application?
- Does your current solution allow for mobile workers to share their location, inventory, files (pictures, videos, manuals, etc.) while using the application?
- Does your solution allow for configurable broadcasts, including company-wide notifications, or region/team specific notifications?
Emerging Technology
- Are you currently using any emerging technologies like Internet of Things Applications (IoT), AR, AI, AR, Machine Learning, etc.?
- If yes, which technologies?
- If no, do you plan on investing in one or more of these in the near future?
Integrations
- Is your current field service solution integrated with any of the emerging technologies, such as Internet of Things Applications (IoT), AR, AI, AR Machine Learning?
- If yes, how do your mobile workers interact with these technologies in the field?
- What other systems do you currently use along with your field service solution? Solutions such as ERP, case management, inventory, etc.?
- Are these systems integrated with your current field service solution?
- Are you using middleware or point-to-point to integrate with your current solution?
Implementation & Support
- Can you describe your implementation experiences?
- How long did your implementation take?
- What ongoing support resources, such as a help desk, are provided after implementation?
- Is support available 24/7/365?
Data Security & Business Continuity
- How does your solution maintain data security and privacy?
- Does your system proactively monitor and maintain mission-critical performance (uptime and availability)?
Your Business: What Do You Need In A Solution?
- What differentiates your business from the competition?
- Can your current solution provide analyst ratings and customer examples of innovation using your solution?
- What kind of ROI can does your current solution offer?
Source: Oracle
How can Speridian help?
Looking to provide outstanding customer satisfaction while reducing field service costs? For the very best integrated, and fully automated field service management and automation solution, leverage the Speridian Advantage™ and implement a next-gen field service management solution.