5 ways to drive better job profitability

Grow your business by focusing on the key areas that will improve your performance and result in happier, more loyal customers over time.

Originally posted for Fieldmagic here.

The way we manage our businesses is changing. To be competitive, we need to worker smarter than ever, while still delivering great customer service.

You may have already noticed this, as you scroll through your feed, while checking your email and responding to that text message about the job that's just been scheduled. Technology is shaping how we do things, and it's not all that bad. Having spoken to a large number of field service providers, the challenge is often more about how to drive additional profitability while sustaining the same cost structure for clients to remain competitive. 

You might be thinking, how can we achieve this? The answer is field service and asset management software. Field service software solutions provide a system of managing your scheduling, job profitability tracking, and connect your business like never before, removing double entry and aiding in you running your business like a well oiled machine. 

In this article, we will look at 5 key areas you may want to focus on to drive better profitability for your business. 

1. Use a mobile field service application

A mobile field service solution provides your technicians with instant access to jobs, assets, and contact information in a portable handle-held solution. This information is always within reach, up-to-date, and secure, allowing your staff to reference key details a lot quicker, update service jobs, and report faults in significantly less time. 

Mobile apps also provide efficiency in quicker turn around times for your office staff. Information is readily available in the office as soon as the job is completed, and any faults detected can be invoiced a lot quicker. This means your more profitable within a given time period, by being able to complete service work quicker, quote quicker, and invoice quicker. The Solutions like our Fieldmagic mobile app for technicians offers an intuitive interface, focusing on usability to better support technicians. 

2. Make use of smart auto-scheduling tools

A huge benefit of job management software is integrated scheduling with technician mobile apps. Office staff can quickly assign jobs in a drag and drop fashion to field workers for both reactive and preventative maintenance work. 

Take this a step further for preventative maintenance, which occurs on a set schedule. Fieldmagic auto-scheduling allows you to further reduce your administrative effort in managing recurring site maintenance. We do this by allowing your office administrators to define a set day and week for the preventative maintenance to be carried out at that site, which feeds into our maintenance wizard and scheduling system.

Fieldmagic will also allow you to set each default technician for the various specific types of maintenance carried out.

The following benefits are realised:

• Auto-allocation of jobs to technicians.
• Auto-setting the the preferred site visit time.
• Auto-attachment of the relevant standards checklists for the job, as well as the related assets to inspect. 

This significantly reduces your office hours spent each month on managing your schedules, which in turn makes you more efficient and more profitable. Staff can focus on other important tasks, like managing relationships and building new business.

3. Provide automated preventative and reactive service reporting

Now that you have your field team using mobile apps, and you can auto-schedule and manage all your maintenance, how about automating the reports you provide to your customers? Imagine if reports were well formatted, comprehensive, and clear? Fieldmagic just does this. 

The benefit of automating aspects of your reporting is two fold: i) It frees up valuable office time by eliminating the manual preparation of reports to customers, and ii) It ensures customers have reports in a timely fashion by reducing the lag time it takes to get a compliance report yo your customers. This all sums up to a seamless service delivery experience for customers, and less administration time overall for everybody. 

4. Empower your customers with online access and visibility

One of the most time consuming aspects of any field service business that can consume endless resources is providing compliance and service reports to customers. While field service software allows you to instantly provide these reports to your customers, a portal can further empower customers. 

With the Fieldmagic Portal, customers can also request reactive works by creating requests in the portal, which allows customers to detail their requirements which is sent directly into FIeldmagic to alert your office staff. This is a very efficient process, as it eliminates double entry for your staff, while allowing your customers control over their requests. 

5. Monitor profitability metrics and refine your practices

As the saying goes, "what you can't measure, you can't improve." The same can be said of your business. Without knowing your job profitability metrics, it's hard to know where things are working, and where things may need a bit of reshuffling. Fieldmagic provides realtime job cost analysis built in to your jobs, so at any point, you can review your job metrics, and even report across your jobs and customers to understand detailed profitability metrics. 

Fieldmagic is designed to empower your staff in the office and out in the field. From reactive works to planned asset maintenance, we've got you covered. Get in touch with our team to learn how we can help you improve your business operations.