Techs Doing Admin Work?

In a survey done in 2020, 250 field service professionals–both technicians and executives from small to enterprise-sized businesses–were polled to do a “pulse check” on their industry.

About 33 percent of managers said their techs could spend as much as 30 minutes a day doing just administrative work such as ordering and documentation. On the technicians’ side, only 19 percent said the same thing.

Ergo, the number of techs doing only a little bit of admin work were just half of what managers thought.

However, 7 percent of managers said their techs spend more than two hours on admin work compared to almost 16 percent of techs saying the same thing.

This meant that the number of techs actually doing admin work were more than twice what the managers thought.

There’s obviously a huge disconnect between what some managers think against what technicians actually do. Many managers seem to be too optimistic when it comes to their technicians’ productivity. In a business where TIME is MONEY, this disconnect is creating a big gap between revenue forecasts and actual revenue.

How does one get higher productivity figures? This is where remote teams come in. There are two aspects where a remote team in the Philippines can support a technician in the United States (or Canada, or Australia, or wherever you may be holding your field service business):

Parts Ordering and other Specialized Administrative Tasks

A remote team can look at manuals, blueprints, search for parts in their inventory and across the web, place orders, and do most routine tasks. Doing so takes most of the admin work off the technicians’ hands, leaving them more time to focus on their actual tasks of repairing and maintaining equipment, or whatever tasks they have on their work orders.

If a certain technician could complete three work orders a day, at two hours per job including travel time, taking the admin tasks off his hands could give him enough time to complete one, even two, more jobs on that day. While this may seem like a small improvement, scale it up and the business can achieve an added 20 percent in service capacity without hiring more technicians.

For context, the remote tech support agents are working full time. That means saving a squad of ten field technicians 20 hours a day. Multiply it by the standard hourly rate of $100 and you’re potentially getting over $80,000 of extra revenue capacity per month that costs a fraction of that.

Beyond Admin Work: Diagnostics and Remote Troubleshooting

With the remote tech support infrastructure in place, it is clear that there are ways to further optimize technicians’ productivity. A senior technician using an iPad can supervise a junior technician who’s onsite hundreds of miles away. The tech who’s on-site can show the remote support agent what he’s seeing, and the remote tech can “operate” on the item using the onsite tech’s hands, showing him what to hold, what to twist, and how.

These kinds of interactions get technicians unstuck faster, increase first-time fix rates, achieve faster resolution time, and reduce the number of truck rolls needed to get the job done. Not only that, your Remote Support Technicians can diagnose and troubleshoot equipment ahead of dispatch, which helps in sending the right technician with the right parts for the right job every time.?

With Origo BPO, you can boost your local technicians’ productivity through remote teams by implementing cutting-edge technology and optimizing workflows for maximum output.

If you’re ready to increase your technicians’ productivity and take your operations to the next level, drop us a line at https://www.origobpo.com/contact-us/