6 areas field service businesses adapt & innovate during a recession.

We are all aware of the recent conversations regarding an impending recession. Whilst we let the economists decide on whether we are currently in one or not, the current reality is the impact from inflation and supply chain issues for field service businesses and why they should adapt.

Your costs are increasing, getting supplies is more challenging and recruiting skilled resources is difficult – all while the demand for your services is up and down like a rollercoaster.

Customers are tightening their belt, either not progressing or reducing field service jobs they would have pushed forward with during a more buoyant economy. This contraction in work for field service providers can happen regardless of whether the recession has been announced or not – it all comes down to market perception and sadly economic optimism has fallen.
Until customers regain enthusiasm about the economy, field service providers will continue to feel the impact. You can respond to a recession by proactively adapting and innovating during this period and one area that can help to you minimise costs and maximise revenues in a balanced manner is field service management software.

Focus On A Winning Strategy

It is easy to think that the go to strategy during a recession is reduce costs and increase revenues. However getting the right balance in your business for both of these elements is very complicated.

Reducing costs can not only impact the quality of service you deliver for your customers, it can also impact staff moral leading to low retention. Long standing customers will notice the difference in service quality and may look for alternatives and staff will be aware of other higher paid opportunities due to demand for their skills. Whilst trying to increase revenues, decisions can be made to take jobs that are not right for the business – there is such a thing as bad revenue. These are jobs that initially look advantageous but prove unsustainable over the longer term and therefore impact the company.

A winning strategy is not a simple matter of applying a percentage increase or decrease to the numbers and hoping that this will see your field service business through a recession. Having visibility of your costs and keeping customers happy by providing service delivery that goes exactly as planned, every single time is a winning strategy. Adapting you how you deliver your service in response to recession concerns must begin with efficient and streamlined processes.

In today’s technology driven world, field service businesses cannot operate using paper based forms, whiteboards and spreadsheets any longer. These disjointed processes are a challenge to manage even during economic boom, but during a recession they become a significant limitation and for those that have not embraced field service management software it becomes a distinct competitive disadvantage.
The list of advantages for field service management software is extensive, but its greatest may be the fact that it makes you more resilient to the unexpected business challenges. What could be a greater tool to have in your business toolbox during a recession?

Recession Proofing

Embracing field service software only makes you better at everything you already do within your business. However it can help to take you further by enabling you to do things that you couldn’t do easily before.

When your business is faced with having to do more with less resources, field service management software will step up to the challenge and assist your business in becoming recession-proof in the following  6 areas:

• Optimise Team Productivity.
  Simply put, your team can complete more work in the same amount of time by utilising field service management software. Imagine getting 10% – 15% more productivity from each team member…
• Avoid Costly & Unnecessary Mistakes.
  Disjointed communication and manual processes can cause a job to become costly to deliver and also potentially upset customer satisfaction. Avoiding unnecessary mistakes and maintaining customer satisfaction during a recession is key. Utilising field service management software will ensure your operations are transparent, informed, and streamlined. Taking advantage of automation technology that is offered will avoid human errors and provide an efficient customer experience.
• Improve Invoicing Accuracy.
  Your customer invoices could be missing billable work the field team worker performed but it wasn’t easy for them to record the work completed therefore it goes astray. With field service management software it makes it easy for those in the field to record their job activities and seamlessly sync that data. In one click an invoice is generated with the correct information and synced with your accounting software. No admin duplication or job details getting missed, and importantly no lost revenue.
• Increase First-Time Fix Rate
  We understand that completing a job in one visit is an important factor for the profitability of jobs and for keeping your customers satisfied with agreed service levels. Field service management software instantly improves the first time fix rate by giving your scheduling team better insights about what a job requires before dispatching and your field team will have all the information at their fingertips in order to overcome challenges.
• Better Manage Supply Chain Issues.
  Continuing supply chain issues will make it harder to deliver service to your customers and meet delivery timescales. Field service management software will provide you a range of inventory management tools. You can easily track and manage inventory whilst also making it easy to forecast future usage based on previous jobs, scheduled jobs, etc, enabling you to be more proactive when placing supplier orders.
• Gain Insight & Action Data-Driven Decisions.
  During economic uncertainty you will be faced with making difficult decisions about things like pricing, service offerings, team resources, etc. Field service management software collects data throughout the entire job management process and enables you to understand your operations like never before. This will allow you to make decisions based on data rather than assumptions. It is vital to know what’s working and what’s not during a recession so you can react with speed and accuracy.

Adapt, Innovate & Expand

In order for your business to ride through the storm of a recession, it is often best to be aggressive rather than conservative with your decisions and that could involve expansion or innovation within the business.

With field service management software you can plan, execute and manage expansion in ways that you simply can’t without software. When you need to innovate quickly, field service management software will facilitate new use cases whilst also highlighting new potential opportunities.

While your competitors are potentially struggling to stay ahead of the economic storm, you can be confident that if you have embraced field service management software you can pivot, scale or evolve to meet the challenge head on and emerge from the recession stronger than before.

Learn More

We have a range of customers in multiple verticals that enjoy the benefits of Klipboard’s field service management software. T learn more and understand their use cases, please visit our case studies library.