A major challenge that hinders a field service business from delivering the best customer service is how it fails to prioritize jobs. As the business grows, the work orders received increase from customers and also include internal ones from inventory, administration, and more. One can only do so much in manually trying to prioritize tasks.
Field service management software includes advanced algorithms that remove the hassle of prioritizing work orders – read more to know how.
How does prioritizing work orders help in better field service management?
Every customer would like to be your priority when it comes to receiving the service. Here’s how crucial prioritization is in enabling your service delivery efforts:
Better customer satisfaction
Some customers and some jobs are indeed more important than others. If your business knows how to identify repeat customers, influencers, or emergency orders – you can build a better brand reputation. Prioritization of jobs also helps reduce the cognitive load for your office teams and managers. They are better able to provide timely resolution to your customers, thus ensuring your field service technicians are not acting on their own.
Reduced inventory downtime
By prioritizing jobs, you better allocate your resources across equipment, tools, materials, and workforce. This leads to reduced bench time for workers such that every worker hired has some job to complete. Such practices also reduce downtime situations for equipment, which ensures they are used. It is helpful when your equipment is taken on a loan or rented, where the payments are usually done on a usage or hourly basis.
Improved dispatching of workers
By knowing which jobs need attention first, it is possible to assign the right field service technician with relevant skill sets for the job. FSM software also marks the job priority as defined by your management, and the workers can pick up their tasks based on the priority tags.
Better adapting capabilities
This means your business is more resilient to surprise jobs or emergency requests.
For example, your customer may reschedule the assigned job, or maybe your assigned field service technician is no longer available due to health concerns. In such unexpected cases, – FSM software helps re-schedule and assign the next available field service technician without manual intervention by your office team.
How to prioritize work orders?
Here are a few best practices that help you prioritize work orders:
Create an urgency assessment matrix
How does your field service business define ‘urgency’ or ‘critical’ job? Create various categories of your jobs based on how critical they are to your business. Also, create an order of importance hierarchy of customers so that you know whom to serve first.
You can build an assessment matrix that your managers or supervisors can use to identify important jobs and schedule the work orders accordingly.
Take location into consideration
Where your field service technicians are located from the job site is important to dispatch the right field service technicians. Knowing their real-time location is even better – as you can understand and make decisions to suggest optimized routes accordingly. To implement this practice, you require GPS-powered field service management software like Zuper.
Analyze historical work order data
Use data analysis tools or choose a field service management software that has such capabilities. This helps you understand which work orders cause a delay, have bad feedback from customers, or have low first-time fix rates. Trends and patterns will help you identify opportunities to scale, improve operational workflows, and provide better value to the customer.
Ensure continuous evaluation of on-ground execution
Take feedback from the customer and the assigned field service workers to get a better handle on the job’s execution. Ensure the feedback is taken into account while prioritizing tasks in the future. Communicate the same with them to promise better service delivery.
Make work order prioritization easy with field service management software
Field service management software is a specialized tool that helps manage and automate field service operations – which includes work order management. Using FSM tools, you can reduce the cognitive load on your workers and managers to prioritize tasks and improve customer satisfaction.
Zuper is a field service management software that includes dedicated AI-enabled features to help you prioritize your work orders – book a demo to learn how it works
