Commercial Services rely heavily on human capital – which is what makes it challenging to ensure efficient operations. One has to ensure a good response rate with customers to ensure repeat business. While manually managing commercial operations seems hard – it is possible to streamline the same using field service management (FSM) tools.
Read more to understand how FSM software helps increase the productivity and efficiency of a commercial services business.
Challenges in operating commercial services
Commercial services as an industry is small, but spread across many other industries like HVAC, facility management, cleaning, janitor services, and much more. With a wide spectrum of operations, here are the top five challenges faced by them:
- Diverse services: when you’re spread across industries, you may face challenges in maintaining service quality with customers. Providing customized services gets more difficult too, and you may end up building a business that provides general output.
- Complicated scheduling: handling workforce scheduling and dispatching manually means errors that result in a waste of time and resources. This also increases response time and issues in coordinating with customers and workers.
- Regulatory compliance: meeting regulatory requirements is important in the commercial services sector, which can get complex due to varied services. One has to keep a tab on the latest updates and global regulations too for compliance.
- Managing data: while diverse services mean a lot of data in terms of customer preferences, worker productivity, customer feedback, etc – there is no point if you don’t have software to analyze the same. Such insights get lost in paperwork and it gets difficult to retrieve information on time.
- Resource allocation: growing commercial businesses can face a resource crunch when catering to a diverse clientele. In such cases, one cannot afford equipment failures or the unavailability of required materials to finish the job.
How does field service management software overcome commercial services’ operational challenges?
Field service management is a specialized yet comprehensive software designed to automate, streamline, and improve various operational tasks in commercial services business. For example, FSM software can help improve the service delivery experience by sharing the real-time location of assigned workers with customers.
Here’s how adopting Field Service Management software solutions helps overcome the above-mentioned challenges:
Efficient scheduling and dispatching
FSM software facilitates automated scheduling – which means:
- It will use forms to collect service requirements from customers
- Intelligently understand the job details
- Assign worker based on their availability, skillset, and proximity to the job site
- Instantly share assigned worker details with customers and the manager
- Automatically handle any rescheduled requests or worker dropouts.
This happened without manual intervention, thus reducing any human errors in scheduling and dispatching of workers.
Effective resource utilization
FSM software includes inventory management features that help in managing equipment, materials, tools, and other resources efficiently. Some key automation include:
- It will ensure workers receive the required equipment to perform the job
- Assign similar jobs to single workers to increase job completion
- Handle maintenance schedules of equipment to reduce downtime using predictive maintenance.
Real-time location and communication
FSM platforms equipped with mobile applications enable instant communication between field teams and customers. This ensures transparency, updates, and timely responses to ensure any emergency is handled with attention and priority.
Mobile access also enables your commercial business with GPS-enabled location updates. These are real-time, hence you can perform route optimization, track equipment location, or keep customers informed about job updates.
Streamlined workflows
Commercial services may often require customization of service delivery to suit the workflows of customers. FSM software will not only automate your standard procedures but will also leave enough room to make sure you can showcase your brand and align with custom requirements.
Prepare data reports
Through analytics and reporting tools, FSM software provides insights into service performance. You can track important business metrics like response time, first-time fix rates, equipment failure rates, cost of business, worker productivity, and much more. This allows your commercial business to make informed decisions for continuous improvement.
Experience efficient and effective operations for your commercial services business
At Zuper, we understand the challenges of running a commercial service business. Our field service management software can adapt to your custom workflows seamlessly. Book a demo today and experience FSM solutions working for your manual tasks.
