With labor being one of your company’s biggest expenses, you need to ensure that everyone is as productive as possible. It’s only by doing this that you’ll be in a position for your business to become more profitable.
4 Ways to Ensure Field Technician Productivity
But if you run a field service company, accurately managing the performance metrics and the performance of the field technicians due to limited supervisory capacity is a huge challenge.
In addition to needing to monitor the track of equipment and schedules, you also need to ensure effective customer delivery to your customers.
Field technician professionals such as field service HVAC can help you with this to improve your management, performance, and services.
So, how can you maximize the productivity of your field technicians? Here are five ways you can optimize the productivity of your field technicians and reach the company’s full potential.
1. Sate and Define Your Productivity Goals
Despite this sounding obvious, it’s vital if you’re going to come up with superior productivity strategies set to achieve certain objectivities. Doing this will enable you to know the steps to take for optimizing your productivity goals.
If you’re setting goals for field technicians, you’ll need a formal system of feedback to inform them of the progress they made towards reaching a particular goal.
You’ll need to have a timeline for regular updates and parameters of the available data that made progress. In addition, you should set goals that stretch and test your field technician’s capabilities and give them an achievable challenge to work with.
For defining and tracking objectives to be effective, you’ll need to have the necessary resources. This ensures that you’ll at times have a comprehensive report during the workday.
However, this wouldn’t be attainable if you don’t have the necessary software and technology.
2. Get the Right Communication Tools
Your choice of communication tools can significantly affect the productivity of your field technicians. Therefore, you must equip your field staff with innovative communication tools that incorporate the latest technology to increase their effectiveness.
Some of the gadgets that you should get for your field technicians include tablets or smartphones. You can also install job management software into these gadgets to help the field technicians to do specific tasks, including;
- Getting your customer’s signature for quick invoicing and billing
- Placing orders for parts
- Checking customer’s service history records
- Finding their way to the client’s site
- Instruction handbooks for older parts
Always make sure you’re using the latest communication technology to ensure you remain competitive. There are many different ways to do this such as going to trade shows, talking to sales reps, and following certain tools manufacturers on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
3. Ensure Real-Time Connectivity
There’s a need for the availability of parts and timeliness if you’re serious about customer satisfaction. This is why you need to invest in cloud-based software that your technicians can use while they’re out in the field.
Doing this provides them with instant access to inventory and changes in the schedule, making them more likely to respond to the customer’s needs quickly.
Thanks to the real-time connectivity, you’ll be able to check out your field technicians. This allows you to make well-timed interventions to avoid possible issues.
It also provides the technicians with a platform they can quickly get in touch with you if they experience a problem and resolve it as soon as possible.
4. Effective Scheduling
Improper scheduling negatively impacts your technician’s productivity, and this ends up annoying your customers eventually.
Customers today have high expectations coupled with intense competition and this will be the last thing you want as it gives your competitors a chance to steal your clients.
The best way to avoid such a scenario would be to invest in scheduling software that gives you almost 100% accuracy. This software also matches jobs to a technician’s availability as it has algorithm factors aspects such as;
- Distance to the different worksite
- The time difference between two jobs
You should also try and ensure that the scheduling strategy is as flexible as possible. This way, it’ll become a lot simpler to make adjustments, making your technicians a lot more productive.
But to achieve effective scheduling, there are a couple of initiatives you need to do, including;
- Track the time your technicians take to work on orders and complete certain tasks.
- Account for your technicians according to their skills and experience. This allows you to identify the best-suited professional to tackle a specific job.
Once you effectively schedule your technicians, they’ll always be on time when delivering services to your clients.
Takeaway
In the field service industry, it’s essential to always think of improving service delivery and optimizing your efficiency. Achieving all this depends on the productivity of your field technicians.
If you aren’t delighted with the efficiency of your field technicians, this guide has highlighted the different measures you can put in place to enhance their overall productivity.
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