You channelize growth for your business by devising strategies that can give you a competitive edge over others. In field services, the workforce that deals with the clients at the ground level plays a very crucial role, so as a field service provider certainly you have strategies centering around your field workforce- strategies for their enhancing their efficiency, productivity, strategies for their training, and development, etc.
Making strategies is just like making plans, and as we all know plans are useful only when they are actionable, otherwise they are nothing but just daydreams. So, you need to make sure that your strategies are actionable in the sense that they are actually driving results. Now, how can you measure the effectiveness of your strategies? For this, you need to set field service metrics that can provide you facts, numbers, concrete data to measure the effectiveness of your strategies.
Too much obsession with numbers can backfire
As a service provider, you need must never lose sight of the fact that the metrics (numbers) you are dealing with are to help you build better strategies or to judge the effectiveness of your strategies. These numbers are not your goals, rather they are the channels to achieve your goals. For instance, if your goal is to improve the sale of your services, then ‘the number of service requests registered per day’ is one metric to assess your improvement towards that goal. But now, if you get too obsessed with this number, then you may overlook that this number is of much less value as a stand-alone metric. Because improvement in sales needs to be judged based on different other metrics as well such as:
- how many of the service requests are escalation cases,
- how many are follow-up service requests,
- what is the profit margin for each of these service requests,
- how many are from new clients, etc.
When you assess all these metrics then only you will get a clear picture of whether your sales are improving or not.
The bottom line is the focus should always be on strategies and goals, and one must avoid shifting from a strategies-driven metrics approach to a metrics-driven strategic approach.
How to keep a tab of the field service metrics?
Field Service management software helps you automate your field services, and in the process, it auto-generates field data that provide you a detailed insight into the metrics. Also, these software suites have inbuilt smart analytics that pulls field data across different verticals, create visually representative reports giving you a clear graph of how your business is performing at different aspects. For instance, if you want to measure the productivity of your field workforce, then the field service software can provide you with data such as the timestamp of each technician for each service, their on-road hours, the number of cases closed in a day, clients feedback, meantime for problem troubleshooting, etc.
The way forward- Field service management software for small business
These FSM software suites are ideal for small businesses because they are multifunctional. These are not just data-capturing software programs, rather these are tools that provide concrete solutions to overcome field operational challenges. Job scheduling, route planning, automated communication, online data collaboration, invoice generation, employees self-services administrative tasks like timesheet filling, attendance marking, time stamping, etc., all these kinds of field service-related processes that are repetitive get automated by these software suites. Thus, save the technicians from productivity leaks, provides the manager real-time visibility into field activities, and in the means time also captures data to provide you actionable insights into your business.