Back to all BlogsHow to improve your Field Service Scheduling
Creating an efficient schedule for your field service team is a challenging task. Your plans can quickly be scrapped when the availability of your team or your customer changes.
To grow your business you’ll need an effective Field Service scheduling system. Below you’ll find how to improve your field service scheduling and what tools you’ll need to succeed.
What’s the best way to schedule Field Service Engineers?
To maintain high levels of customer satisfaction and complete more billable jobs you need to have an effective scheduling system.
Start by prioritise your team’s workload and ensure you get the right people on the job, visibility of their availability is key to an effective scheduling system.
By using Field Service Management Software or Job Management Software as it’s also known, you can view your team’s workload at glance, send jobs directly to their mobile app and update them in real time and can react when your plans suddenly change.
The best way to schedule your Field Service engineers is to digitalise your job scheduling and streamline your operation, from booking to confirmation.
What’s better, reactive or planned maintenance schedules?
Whether your team responds reactive repairs or you carry out a Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM) servicing schedule is entirely dependant on the market you operate in.
Some Field Service businesses choose to carry out a PPM schedule because it offers two key benefits to their customer.
- It ensures your availability by booking in advance
- Preventative servicing can extend the life of assets and machinery
You can read more on this here: What is a PPM Schedule?
However, some service businesses such as Pest Control or Locksmith services are mostly reactive and will need to adjust their scheduling to suit.
Consider the specific needs of your customer and if you know there’s value in offering a long term planned servicing schedule then discuss that with them keeping in mind the two key benefits to them as mentioned.
It’s also worth noting the positive effect a PPM schedule can have on your own team. Their morale and motivation could be improved by knowing exactly what’s expected of them and being assigned to specific clients over a longer and consistent period will help build rapport.
It’s important to remember to rotate your resources if you have the capacity. Having one engineer in your team with all the knowledge of a particular customer’s equipment does leave you exposed should that person is unavailable or choosing to move on to another employer. Get around this by occasionally rotating their responsibilities, the variety in work and equipment will develop their skill set too.
How poor scheduling affects your Field Service business
Missed jobs and no shows cost you time, money and your reputation. The Field Service industry is such a competitive market, there’s no room for avoidable mistakes. It’s important to have your client’s best interests centre to your operation and having an effective job scheduling system is a great way of achieving this objective.
Poor job scheduling is one of the key issues holding back a lot of Field Service businesses, here are some of effects of poor scheduling:
Lost revenue
It’s difficult to grow your businesses when you’re unable to service every customer or when miscommunication impedes your ability to complete every scheduled service.
Missing jobs or failing to meet service level agreements will cost your business revenue.
Excessive time spent on admin
How much time is your team spending on job scheduling admin or report writing?
If you’re not using Klipboard your team likely spending a lot of time either sending emails with job details to each team member or those engineers are spending excessive time looking for the details they need.
In a recent survey we discovered the average Field Service professional spends over 5 hours a week on admin tasks.
Poor customer satisfaction and team morale
It’s not just your customers who suffer from poor job scheduling your own team is affected too.
Motivation and job satisfaction is greatly reduced when your team isn’t given the right tools to carry out their responsibilities.
Compliance failures leading to fines
A poor scheduling system affects your ability to ensure all scheduled services or inspections are completed. This can have a significant effect on compliance particularly in highly regulated industries such as Fire Safety, Water Treatment and Medical Equipment servicing.
In March 2021 the UK government issued new regulations to impose ‘Unlimited fines for those who breach fire safety regulations’. This means building owners could face unlimited fines for failing to ensure fire safety is ensured.
A company responsible for commercial chillers can be fined up to £200,000 for causing an F-gas leak and fails to report it or attempts to avoid the recovery procedure.
Your customers are at risk if you’re unable to ensure you can complete a comprehensive and effective servicing schedule.
Who should be responsible for job scheduling?
Job scheduling is often the responsibility of the back office team. Engineers are given details of their workload by administrators and it’s a time intensive task.
Emailing schedules, updating spreadsheets and taking phone calls from the field team and customers is very time intensive.
The nature of Field Service work makes job scheduling difficult. The availability of clients or access to a customer’s location can change and this affects the effectiveness of a Field Service engineer’s schedule.
How do you schedule the service of hundreds or thousands of assets?
Managing a team of engineers is tricky to get right, but managing the scheduled maintenance of thousands of assets is even more challenging.
Many Field Service businesses are responsible for keeping their clients assets working in peak condition, minimising downtime and extending the operational lifecycle of the asset. Scheduling the jobs to ensure each asset is serviced at the right time means juggling the workload of your engineers and being able to keep on top of the due dates for each service. When the number of assets you service reaches the hundreds and thousands that can be a real challenge.
Here’s how Climbing Wall equipment specialist, Entre-Prises, use Job Management Software from Klipboard to ensure they don’t miss a single service of over 5000 assets under their responsibility.
How you could also benefit
Entre-Prises have significantly reduced the amount of admin they have to do each week and save around 20 hours a month by using Klipboard. You don’t need to be managing thousands of assets to benefit from Field Service Scheduling software, any Field Service business who manages the upkeep of clients assets will find it streamlines their business.
How to plan through your seasonal busy period
Most Field Service businesses have a busy season. A time of the year when their services are in increased demand.
Drainage servicing contractors will find their schedule and availability is put under strain during downpour seasons. While HVAC servicing businesses will see an increase in demand during peak summer months or the height of winter.
Having an effective job scheduling system in place will help Field Service businesses navigate through their busy periods. It will help them ease the workload across their team evenly and ensure no customers are left out.
Align your Service Level Agreements with your busy periods
When you’re able to schedule your work in advance you can meet your customers expectations and ensure the work gets completed during slower periods where your services aren’t as strained with emergency call outs.
This method also helps with your overheads as you aren’t paying the hourly rate for employees without the work to complete or asking them to do too much during the busy periods.
Avoid Burnout
Around 18 million days are lost in workplaces every year in the UK due to work-related stress. A lot of this could be avoided with more care given to employee welfare and the impact of excessive workloads.
It’s tricky to spot burnout so it’s better to have precautions in place to minimise the likelihood your team will be affected by it.
Having an improved field service job scheduling system in place will help your team find a better work/life balance. You can read more on this subject here: How to prevent burnout in a team
How difficult is it to start using Field Service scheduling software?
Not everyone is tech savvy. In fact a lot of people might prefer traditional ways of working even if it’s costing them more time.
Eddie Loughran, Klipboard’s Head of Customer Experience, has shared his Top 5 tips on getting your team onboard with new job scheduling software without a hitch.
Whenever you ask people to try something new or adjust how they work, you get a little change aversion and push back. Here’s my top five benefits that will help win them over and highlight how they could benefit from bringing your processes into the modern age.
- Using Klipboard mobile forms to standardise the information your collect from the field will greatly reduce human error. Mandatory fields and workflows will make sure your team doesn’t miss anything and save your business hours every week.
- No more back and forth to the office will greatly reduce your team’s travelling time. Having the ability to digitally send over invoices and paperwork from a completed job will vastly reduce admin and traveling time.
- Your engineers won’t need to travel to the office each day, they wake up in the morning, sync their phone and their next job is right there, with all the information and more they would normally get from a job sheet.
- Allow your engineers to focus on what they are good at. They will get greater job satisfaction and you’ll increase earning potential and revenue
- The Klipboard app is designed to be easy to use. Receiving assigned jobs, viewing job information and viewing their schedule is simple.
How to improve your Field Service Scheduling
Field Service businesses who want to grow need a solution to the problems caused by inefficient job scheduling.
Field Service Management Software has provided the answer. By using an online system like Klipboard to share bookings, confirmations and job details, field service businesses are able to instantly distribute information around their team and quickly adjust their schedule when plans change.
Benefits of using Klipboard
You can improve the entire job and customer experience and provide a seamless operation from work requests to getting an invoice paid. Here are some of the benefits of using Klipboard for your Field Service Management software.
Manage jobs more effectively with our Drag and Drop Scheduler
We’ve recently made some fantastic updates to our Drag and Drop Scheduler.
Our scheduler was already a quick and efficient way of managing your job bookings and now your team has even more improved visibility of the next day, week, month and beyond.
We’ve added the ability to filter what you can see, so you can focus on specific team members or customers. We’ve also made navigating your schedule fast, you can quickly jump to a week, month or a specific team member in no time.
Automate your customer communication
The modern customer expects an ‘Uber-like’ experience. In the same way they can track a parcel delivery, a taxi or food order, they expect their field service partners to inform them when an engineer or technician will arrive.
While those well known delivery and service businesses have heavily invested in their software systems to deliver this service, you can benefit immediately by using Klipboard.
You can quickly and easily set up bespoke automated customer communications to your clients. When a job is booked your admin is totally hands-free as Klipboard emails or sends them an SMS message to tell them a job is booked, an engineer is on the way or a job is complete.
You decide the message. Klipboard does the rest.
Improved commutation will reduce the number of job no-shows and increase the rate your team is able to successfully complete a job and invoice for it.
You can read more on this subject here: How to create an Uber-like experience
Use a Client Portal to reduce the time spent answering customer requests
Put an end to back and forth emails and calls with your customers by using the Klipboard Client Portal. Your customers are able to submit work requests, approve quotes online and check in on their job progress.
All they have to do is click on a link you send them and they will have all the information they need, leaving you to get the work done.
Summary: How to improve your Field Service Scheduling
Excellent Field Service scheduling comes down to improving the flow of information around your business and to your customer.
With a clear picture of what your team’s workload looks like and the right software in place to manage it, you’ll be able to efficiently schedule more jobs, complete more services and keep your client satisfied.
Here’s the areas you should improve and focus your attention towards:
- Decide whether to focus on Reactive or PPM schedules and discuss that with your customer
- Review your existing ways of booking and scheduling jobs
- Consider it’s affect on your team and your customer
- Pick a Job Management Software provider – before you do that read our guide on the things you need to consider before starting a trial it will save you time in the long run!
Start streamlining your Field Service operation and begin a FREE TRIAL with Klipboard today.
